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标题: 英语新闻（English news about China） [打印本页]
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-3-27 10:47     标题: 英语新闻（English news about China）

"I'm" fad among Chinese MSN users——fr. China Daily

It seems that almost all your friends' names on MSN have added a little green "i'm" symbol overnight. If you ask what is going on, someone will tell you it's a charity initiative and send you an intro link. Though this charity program has not yet officially launched for Chinese users, this little green symbol has proven popular among Chinese Windows Live Messenger users. Windows Live Messenger's official blog announced on March 1 that Microsoft was launching an "i'm"  program in United States. Every time someone starts a conversation using i'm, Microsoft shares a portion of the program's advertising revenue with nine organizations dedicated to social causes. With every instant message a user sends, it helps address issues one feels most passionate about, including poverty, child protection, disease and environmental degradation. One only has to add certain code next to one's name for the organization one would like to support. "*red'u" is for the American Red Cross, "*bqca" is for Boys & Girls Clubs of America and "*unicef" stands for the American branch of UNICEF. After a Chinese blogger named "hung" introduced this program on his blog on March 2, "i'm" has invaded the Internet in China with no actual promotional campaign from Microsoft. Beijing-based Youth Weekend reported that famous IT blogger Keso regarded this program's rapid spread as a successful virus marketing case. He thinks that the success of the "i'm" program is because it's spread by users without being a bother to others. This answers why "i'm" has spread so rapidly across the Internet like a virus with almost no promotion. However, Feng Jinhu from the press center for Microsoft China told Youth Weekend that the "i'm" project is only eligible for Messenger users in United States. Instant messages sent by Chinese users would not count. This has not affected Chinese Messenger users' passion for the little green symbol. These users hope their instant messages will actually become donations to charitable organizations someday.




[ 本帖最后由 fussfun 于 2007-3-27 11:55 编辑 ]
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-3-27 11:03

me too, an i'm user. The text code i set up is *help: stopglobalwarming,
hehe, the environment problem is really critical.

The Microsoft is not pulling our legs, isn't it?
I do trust Bill Gates quite a lot , hopefully he will not abuse our trust.:naughty:

[ 本帖最后由 fussfun 于 2007-3-28 00:54 编辑 ]
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-3-27 23:56     标题: Pungent pulp: Panda poop perfect for paper（CNN）


BEIJING, China (AP) -- There's a new Chinese saying: When life hands you panda poop, make paper.

Researchers at a giant panda reserve in southern China are looking for paper mills to process their surplus of fiber-rich panda excrement into high quality paper.

Liao Jun, a researcher at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base in Sichuan province, said the idea came to them after a visit to Thailand last year where they found paper made from elephant dung. They thought panda poop would produce an even finer quality paper, he said.

The base is in talks with several paper mills on how to turn the droppings of Jing Jing, Ke Bi, Ya Ya and dozens of other pandas at the base into reams of office paper and rolls of wrapping paper, Liao said.

They hope to have a product line available by next year, he said.

"We are not interested in doing this for the profits but to recycle the waste," said Liao.

"It's environmentally friendly. We can use the paper ourselves, and also we can sell whatever is left over."

The center's 40 bamboo-fed pandas produce about 2 tons of droppings a day, but Liao said he was not sure yet how much paper would result.

What about squeamish customers who might consider the paper unsanitary?

"People won't find it gross at all," Liao said. "They probably won't even be able to tell it's from panda poop."

The Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand already sells multicolored paper made from the excrement produced by its two resident pandas. Making paper there involves a daylong process of cleaning the feces, boiling it in a soda solution, bleaching it with chlorine and drying it under the sun.

panda poop




[ 本帖最后由 fussfun 于 2007-3-28 00:58 编辑 ]
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-3-28 22:37     标题: China and Russia to explore Mars (CNN online)

BEIJING, China (Reuters) --

China and Russia will mount a joint effort to explore Mars and one of its moons in 2009, Chinese state media reported on Wednesday following an agreement to boost cooperation between the two ambitious space powers.

A Russian rocket will lift a Chinese satellite and Russian exploration vehicle to survey Mars and Phobos, the innermost and biggest of the red planet's moons, the China Daily reported, citing China's National Space Administration.

The announcement followed an agreement signed on Monday in Moscow, where Chinese President Hu Jintao has been visiting.

A Chinese space official said the agreement would boost cooperation between China and Russia, both eager to expand their presence in space as the United States seeks to keep its lead.

"It indicates the two sides have taken a key step forward to working on a large space program," said the official, according to the China Daily.

The small Chinese satellite will explore Mars while the Russian craft will land on Phobos to explore the environment and scoop up soil samples.

Russia has much more experience than China in space exploration. But Beijing has been using its newly acquired wealth and technological muscle to break into the exclusive space club.

In 2003, China put a man in space, becoming only the third country to achieve the feat after the United States and the Soviet Union. It launched a second manned space flight last year and plans to eventually land a person on the moon.

The United States has announced its own plans to expand exploration of Mars and eventually send a manned expedition there. Washington chided Beijing in January for testing an anti-satellite missile that pulverized an old Chinese satellite, scattering debris that could damage other satellites.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-3-28 22:41

right strategy
coupling with Russia against U.S.A:naughty:
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-3-30 09:12     标题: Reporting protests in rural China (BBC)

In a one-party state, made up of more than a billion people, there is an awful lot to hide.

On any given day in China there may be 200 different protests. Most take place in the countryside, where many feel left behind by China's economic boom. But the Chinese state works hard to make sure that these demonstrations are kept well out of sight. This week, though, there was an exception. People in the town of Zhushan, near the city of Yongzhou, in central China's Hunan province, burned buses in a protest against a rise in bus fares. Riot police were sent in to take control. A camera crew managed to film and broadcast pictures of the aftermath. We wanted to go and have a look for ourselves.  

Security presence
Until last year, there was a clear procedure to follow. We would have needed permission from the local authorities to travel to Zhushan. Once we got there, local officials would have had to accompany us to every interview. But, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Communist Party has decided to relax its rules.

In theory, foreign journalists no longer need to seek permission from the local authorities in order to visit. So, I flew with my colleagues to Hunan and we drove straight into the town of Zhushan. Along the main road, shops and market stalls were open. All evidence of the recent protests had been swept away. But as we drove on, we saw riot police standing in formation in the grounds of the police station. The station's gates were left open. A few blocks away, we saw soldiers in green camouflage uniform. A handful were standing over a pot preparing to cook a leg of pork. We approached a few local people who were happy to talk to us. They told us that problems began after the Chinese New Year in February when a single bus company took control of all local routes. They say the company took advantage of its monopoly to double its fares. One regular passenger told us that fares rose from between five to seven yuan (65-90 US cents) to 15 yuan ($1.90).

Violent clashes
What angered people in Zhushan was the belief that their local officials were colluding with the bus company to raise prices - for a share of the takings. So, last Friday, parents of secondary school students started to protest against the fare rises.

The protests gained momentum. Four days later, reports say that around 20,000 people took part in demonstrations. Protestors set fire to a number of buses. At this point riot police moved in to impose order. "I was scared," said one woman, who did not want to be identified. "My whole body trembled. I ran away holding my baby. I heard they attacked a pregnant woman. Also they dragged a man off his motorbike to beat him. They didn't care whether or not you were a protester."  

Reporter's arrest
Still, the protesters made their point. The bus company was forced to abandon its fare rise. But it came at a cost. It is reported that dozens of people were injured and that one student was killed, although the Chinese authorities denied there were any deaths.

We tried to check the report of the student's death. One woman insisted that he had not been killed, but his legs had been broken. No-one could give us his name. Before we could find out any more, several dozen soldiers approached us and told us to stop what we were doing. They told us the town was under military control and we did not have permission to stay. They called for the local police. The police decided we should answer questions in the upstairs bedroom of a hotel off the main road. So we climbed the stairs, sat on the bed and handed over our documents. Half a dozen officers watched over us. Several had video cameras with them - so our interrogation turned into a kind of photo shoot. The officers took it in turn to film us as well as each page of our passports. Then, two senior officers came in. The room went quiet. "You need a certificate of permission to be in this town," said one of them as he sifted through the passports. Then he paused and looked up to make his point. "Do you have such a certificate?" "No, we don't," I replied. "This is not Britain or the United States," he warned. "This is China." We told him of the new decree that allowed foreign journalists to travel anywhere in China without permission. "That's only for Olympics-related stories," he said. Then he paused again. "And I don't think you are here for the Olympics." He looked down at the passports once more. Outside, it was beginning to get dark. In the hallway, officers discussed the idea of watching us overnight. We prepared for a long stay. But then, they told us we could go. We were escorted to our car. Slightly bizarrely, the police officers stood by the side of the road and waved us off. They had made their point - this was their town. And we had broken their rules. We left Zhushan. We never did get to find out the name of the teenage boy who may or may not have been killed in the protests.

[ 本帖最后由 fussfun 于 2007-3-30 10:16 编辑 ]
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-3-30 09:15

for the chinese goverment a single common life is  not so much worthy of attention
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-3-31 08:45     标题: Japan deploys missile near Tokyo

IRUMA, Japan (Reuters) -- Japan trucked its first ballistic missile interceptors to an air force base north of Tokyo on Friday in an effort to beef up its defenses against its unpredictable neighbor North Korea.
The deployment of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) launchers, capable of shooting down incoming missiles in the final stage of flight as they near their target, was sparked by Pyongyang's firing of a ballistic missile in 1998 that flew over Japan.
But Tokyo rushed the equipment into service a year ahead of schedule after North Korea unnerved the region last year by firing more missiles and testing a nuclear device.
"We consider it very meaningful to deploy the air defense missiles close to metropolitan Tokyo, which is the center of business and political activities," Kazumasa Echizen, the Iruma air base public-information chief, said in a statement. "We will continue our efforts to be ready for any possible emergencies."
About 50 demonstrators shouted and waved banners as a line of green trucks carried the equipment through the gates of the base, about 40 km (25 miles) from central Tokyo, before dawn on Friday.
"Bringing PAC-3s to places like Iruma makes them the focus of interception strategy and therefore at risk of becoming the target of attack by other countries," an activist group said in a statement condemning the deployment as a "military performance".

Closer to Tokyo

The relatively short range of PAC-3 interceptors -- about 20 km (12 miles) -- means they are likely to be deployed closer to the center of the capital to protect financial and government hubs. More interceptors are set to be deployed at bases around the country over the next few years.
The United States has already deployed its own PAC-3s at a base on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, and has deployed ship-based Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) missile interceptors at Yokosuka, west of Tokyo.
The new interceptors are the first to be controlled by the Japanese government, which has been pushed into a tighter defense relationship with the United States as regional tensions rise.
Tokyo's close involvement in U.S. defense strategy in Asia, while not as controversial as Washington's planned shield in eastern Europe, stretches the boundaries of Japan's pacifist constitution. Russia reacted angrily to U.S. plans to place parts of such a shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Japan limits military activities strictly to self-defense, meaning it is unable to shoot down a missile which is not headed for its own territory. The restriction annoys some officials in the United States.
Tokyo plans to equip one of its own warships with SM-3 interceptors, intended to shoot down ballistic missiles in the mid-phase of flight while outside the earth's atmosphere, by the end of this year.
It will attempt to bring down a dummy missile using its own ship-based SM-3 interceptors in a test later this year, Lieutenant-General Henry Obering, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee this week, in the first such test by a U.S. ally.
Japan's spending on missile defense is set to increase by 30.5 percent to 182.6 billion yen ($1.55 billion) in the financial year that starts next month.
Friday's deployment came after a setback for Japanese intelligence this week, when one of the set of four satellites it launched to monitor North Korea broke down. It is not scheduled to be replaced until 2011.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-1 08:59     标题: Re-education

I. The Student

“Definitely wake me up around 9!!! I have an important presentation . . . wake me up at that time please. . . . Thanks!! Meijie.”

The e-mail message, sent to me at 3:55 a.m. under the subject line “yeah!” was my enthusiastic welcome to Harvard from a freshman named Tang Meijie. That was last May, nine months after she arrived on campus from mainland China. Except for the ungodly hour at which the message was dashed off, you wouldn’t have guessed that its author had come to Cambridge trailing accomplishments and expectations that were impressive even by Harvard standards. Nor was there obvious evidence of a student superstar in the tousled figure in a sweatshirt and khakis who appeared at the Greenhouse Café in the Science Center at around 10 a.m. Greeting me with a reflexive bow, as she had at our first meeting a couple of months earlier, Meijie apologized for taking a few minutes to finish up the talk she had been assigned to give that morning in one of her courses.

Her topic gave her away. What Meijie was editing between bites of a bacon cheeseburger and sips of coffee was a short presentation for an expository-writing class called Success Stories. The questions addressed in the course, which focused on “what philosopher William James once called ‘our national disease,’ the pursuit of success,” have become newly urgent ones in Meijie’s own country. “What is ‘success’?” the course introduction asked. “Is it a measure of one’s financial worth? Moral perfection? Popularity? How do families, schools and popular culture invite us to think about success? And how are we encouraged to think about failure?” At Harvard, she and her classmates were discussing those issues as they read, among other things, “The Great Gatsby” and David Brooks on America’s résumé-rich “organization kids” and watched movies. In China, a nation on a mission to become a 21st-century incubator of “world class” talent, Meijie is the movie. As she progressed through her classes in the cutting-edge city of Shanghai, spent a year abroad at a private high school in Washington, D.C., and came to Harvard, she became a celebrated embodiment of China’s efforts to create a new sort of student — a student trying to expand her country’s sometimes constricting vision of success.

Downstairs in the computer room of the Science Center, Meijie showed me the thousands of Chinese citations that come up when you Google her name. “That’s very crazy,” she said with a laugh, a girl all too familiar with the Chinese ardor for anything associated with the name Harvard. Getting in “early action” in December 2004 set off a media frenzy at home, where it’s still relatively rare for students to enroll as undergraduates at elite American schools, and study abroad promises to provide a crucial edge in a jammed job market. A packet of press coverage her parents gave me — Meijie rolled her eyes at the trove — portrayed her as every Chinese parent’s dream child. Child magazine accompanied photos of Meijie and her parents with counsel on how to “raise a great child.” The winner of no fewer than 76 prizes at the “city level” or above, as one article marveled, she was a model that top Chinese students themselves were dying to emulate. “What Does Her Success Tell Us?” read a headline on an article in The Shanghai Students’ Post. “Meijie Knocked at the Door of Harvard. Do You Want to Copy?” asked The Morning News Express in bold Chinese characters. For months, she was besieged by journalists begging to profile her; publishers, she recalls, clamored to sign her up to write her life story and companies asked her to advertise their products. A director of Goldman Sachs’s China division wanted her on the board of the private school he recently helped found, which was then under construction in an erstwhile rice field outside Shanghai.

But what was truly exceptional about Meijie was how she responded to the adulation. The fervent worship back home made Meijie uncomfortable and anxious to clarify what she wasn’t. “Don’t call me ‘Harvard Girl,’ ” she told one of many magazine interviewers. She was referring to a student six years ahead of her, Liu Yiting, whose arrival at Harvard in 1999 made her a huge celebrity in China when her parents published a book, “Harvard Girl,” describing the meticulous regimen that produced their star. It quickly sold almost a million and a half copies and inspired numerous how-to-groom-your-child-to-get-into-college-abroad knockoffs. For all her triumphs, Meijie wasn’t obsessed with being at the head of the class and didn’t want the well-programmed-paragon treatment. She excelled in assorted subjects, but her school reported that her overall ranking wasn’t in the top 10 percent. Her parents had stood by, a little stunned, as their intrepid daughter won distinction in an unusual way, by accomplishing all kinds of things outside of the classroom.

Amid the hoopla, Meijie insisted that the last thing Chinese students (or parents) needed was to be encouraged in their blind reverence for an academic brand name, much less be told there was some new formula to follow and competitive frenzy to join. That was just the kind of pressure they had too much of already. It was everywhere in a culture with a long tradition of rigidly hierarchical talent selection, dating back to the imperial civil-service-exam system more than a thousand years ago — and still there in a school system driven by a daunting national college-entrance exam. The Chinese call it the gaokao, a three-day ordeal for which the preparation is arduous — and on which a single point difference can spell radically different life options. The cramming ethos, which sets in before high school, was what Meijie had tried hard not to let erode her curiosity. In her experience, America had come to stand for a less pressured and more appealing approach to schooling. “There is something in the American educational system that helps America hold its position in the world,” she told me. “Many people will think it’s a cliché, but there is something huge about it, although there are a lot of flaws — like bad public schools and other stuff. But there’s something really good, and it’s very different from my educational system.”

Once at Harvard, in the fall of 2005, Meijie figured out what she wanted to do. She would try to make liberal education’s ideal of well-rounded self-fulfillment “more real in China.” She plunged into conceiving a summer exchange program run by and for students. Meijie named it the Harvard Summit for Young Leaders in China, or Hsylc — pronounced “H-silk,” evoking the historic trading route. In August 2006, on the campus of that now-completed private school outside Shanghai whose board she had joined, a cosmopolitan array of Harvard undergraduates would offer a dose of the more freewheeling American campus and classroom experience. Meijie and an inner circle of organizers (similarly on-the-go Harvard women, all of Chinese descent, some reared in the U.S.) envisaged nine days of small-group discussions on wide-ranging issues outside of math and science. Hsylc would also offer extracurricular excitement and social discovery — chances for students to try new things and connect with one another, rather than compete for prizes. The participants that Meijie had in mind were several hundred promising Chinese high-schoolers, to be chosen in an un-Chinese way. She and a selection committee would pick them on the basis not of their G.P.A.’s but of their extracurricular activities and their essays in response to the kinds of open-ended prompts they never encountered at school. On her list was a question that might be a banality in the U.S. but was a heresy at home: “If you could do one thing to change the world, what would it be?”

Meijie’s answer to that question — help shake up Chinese education — puts her in step with the latest wave of a 30-year-old government effort to overhaul China’s schools and universities to keep pace with “socialist modernization.” After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when schools were closed and cadres of students assaulted “enemies of the state,” Deng Xiaoping resumed the National College Entrance Exam in 1977, marking the start of a radical expansion of the education system. A developing economy demanded it; the implications for politics were less clear, and after Tiananmen Square, there was a brief slowdown. The continued growth since then has been a success in many respects; educational attainments and college attendance have surged. Yet in the process, some prominent government officials have grown concerned that too many students have become the sort of stressed-out, test-acing drone who fails to acquire the skills — creativity, flexibility, initiative, leadership — said to be necessary in the global marketplace. “Students are buried in an endless flood of homework and sit for one mock entrance exam after another, leaving them with heads swimming and eyes blurred,” lamented former Vice Premier Li Lanqing in a book describing his efforts to address the problem. They arrive at college exhausted and emerge from it unenlightened — just when the country urgently needs a talented elite of innovators, the word of the hour. A recent report from the McKinsey consulting firm, “China’s Looming Talent Shortage,” pinpointed the alarming consequences of the country’s so-called “stuffed duck” tradition of dry and outdated knowledge transfer: graduates lacking “the cultural fit,” language skills and practical experience with teamwork and projects that multinational employers in a global era are looking for.

Even as American educators seek to emulate Asian pedagogy — a test-centered ethos and a rigorous focus on math, science and engineering — Chinese educators are trying to blend a Western emphasis on critical thinking, versatility and leadership into their own traditions. To put it another way, in the peremptorily utopian style typical of official Chinese directives (as well as of educationese the world over), the nation’s schools must strive “to build citizens’ character in an all-round way, gear their efforts to each and every student, give full scope to students’ ideological, moral, cultural and scientific potentials and raise their labor skills and physical and psychological aptitudes, achieve vibrant student development and run themselves with distinction.” Meijie’s rise to star student reflects a much-publicized government call to promote “suzhi jiaoyu” — generally translated as “quality education,” and also sometimes as “character education” or “all-round character education.” Her story also raises important questions about the state’s effort, which has been more generously backed by rhetoric than by money. The goal of change is to liberate students to pursue more fulfilling paths in a country where jobs are no longer assigned; it is also to produce the sort of flexibly skilled work force that best fits an international knowledge economy. But can personal desires and national demands be reconciled? Will the most promising students of the new era be as overburdened and regimented as before? As new opportunities have begun to emerge, so have tensions. If Meijie’s own trajectory and her Hsylc brainchild are any guide, the force most likely to spur on deep-seated educational ferment in China may well turn out to be students themselves — still struggling with stress, yet doing so in an era of greater personal independence and international openness. Overachievers of the world unite!

II. The Expansion

Brave Shanghai’s traffic and head southwest for 40 minutes to the well-groomed grounds of Xiwai International School, the site of last year’s Hsylc conference, and you see the broad contours of what has been happening in Chinese education. In an area that is projected to become Shanghai’s biggest satellite city, new construction is everywhere and up-to-date school campuses are being built. While American leaders have been debating how best to demand more accountability from a decentralized education system, the Chinese government has decided to loosen its administrative and financial control. The process dates back 20 years now, to the Decision on the Reform of the Education System, issued in 1985 (the year Meijie was born). The push was on to consolidate the Soviet-style hyperspecialized universities into more comprehensive institutions; with the Compulsory Education Law of 1986, mandating nine years of education for all, a major expansion was also under way. In the early 1990s, the government urged an easing of exam pressures and took the step of encouraging “social forces” to establish private schools alongside the public system.
Parents whose own schooling was curtailed by the Cultural Revolution have been avid to realize their educational ambitions — the Confucian key to social and moral advancement — in the paths they chart for their “little emperors,” the singletons mandated by the one-child policy of the past quarter of a century. The pace of growth and school privatization surged in the course of the 1990s. The goal was to send 15 percent of the college-age population on to the postsecondary level — that figure being the standard definition of “mass higher education” — by 2010. Meanwhile, extra financing went to a group of top universities in a quest to make them “world class.” And in the new millennium, rice paddies are still making way for state-of-the-art school facilities. A nonprofit, private school, Xiwai could be mistaken for a medium-size college. Its spacious brick classroom buildings and dorms (capacity 3,500 students, from pre-K to 12th grade) flank a lovely courtyard with a fountain in the middle. At one end stand an imposing library and a dining facility, and across the way is a large arts-and-sports complex.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-1 09:18

“You could say we overbuilt,” said Xiwai’s co-founder, Xu Ziwang. Boyish in his khakis and navy blazer, Xu, who is 50, has energy to match the wealth he earned as one of Goldman Sachs’s first mainland Chinese partners. He has devoted both his zeal and money to establishing the school with Lin Min, Xiwai’s headmaster, plowing proceeds from local real estate development into the enterprise. Theirs is a project with roots in a past that could hardly have seemed more remote on the balmy fall day the two of them proudly showed me around the one-year-old campus. Friends from their teenage years on a farm during the Cultural Revolution, Xu and Lin were sent from school to the countryside when they were about the age of the oldest Xiwai students who greeted us cheerfully on the paved pathways. The two men were among the many millions who, feverishly studying when they weren’t busy at their appointed labors, swarmed to take the college-entrance exam in the first sittings in 1977 and 1978; they ended up among the few who scored high enough to secure a scarce college spot. Thirty years later, both had studied and worked abroad (Xu in the United States, Lin in Slovenia, England and New Zealand), and back home, Xu had played a big role in privatization deals. Here they stood on what had been mud, eagerly sharing their vision of a pedagogical and curricular renaissance that would produce a generation “better than us.”

What a fortunate cohort today’s kids were, both men said: young people growing up in a booming country that had plenty of problems but also a growing middle class and expanding horizons. By 2006, China had vastly exceeded its higher-education enrollment goal; 22 percent of the college-age population — compared with roughly 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States — were receiving some form of postsecondary schooling. Yet Xu and Lin also joined in the widespread worry that Chinese youths, spared the real-life challenges their elders were forced to cope with, faced very different constraints. Hunkered down, doing endless exam-haunted schoolwork, they were constantly hovered over by their parents. In 1998, years before the McKinsey report of a talent shortage, Xu heard the wake-up call when he initiated Chinese recruiting for Goldman Sachs.

He picked three graduates from China’s top universities and was impressed that they all scored 100 percent on the exam following the associate training stint in New York — only to be disappointed a year later, when their performance reviews were in the bottom quartiles. “There’s a price,” he concluded, “for 12 years of prep for an exam, and that’s to always think there’s a narrow, right answer. If you give precise instructions, they do well. If you define a task broadly, they get lost and ask for help.” If he and Lin had their way, independent students eager to use their imaginations would be the dominant breed on their campus. They were counting on a rising tide of “broad-minded” parents eager to provide their children with the less-straitjacketed education — a creative mix of the best of East and West — that Xiwai preached and aimed to find teachers able to impart. But as we toured a campus plastered with exhortations to be “global citizens” and to “Smile, Embrace, Communicate, Cooperate, Negotiate,” Xu was also blunt: there are lots of obstacles, not the least of them the gaokao that exerts such sway. “The dilemma is, everybody realized it is the problem, but nobody knows what to do.”

Chinese routinely say they wish the exam weren’t such a monolithic force, and various provinces have lately been allowed to offer their own versions. Yet bigger changes — like Fudan University’s use last year of broader criteria and a totally different test to admit some 300 students — stir concern. In a country so huge — and in a culture so steeped in cronyism — the fear is that no other process could work as fairly. Meanwhile, the success of China’s educational expansion hasn’t eased gaokao panic, and in fact has made the secondary-school exam a newly fraught hurdle. The unforseen pressures have unfolded this way: As the number of college graduates has outpaced the growth in desirable high-level jobs, generally located in China’s developed eastern region, one result has been a surge of unemployment among degree holders who resist settling for less. Along with that has come a rise in qualifications for lower-level jobs that once didn’t require a college diploma.

The situation has left students still desperately chasing elite-university credentials. A degree from the most prestigious Chinese schools, especially those given extra money in the quest for “world class” status (with Fudan and Jiao Tong universities in Shanghai, Peking and Tsinghua in Beijing at the pinnacle) — or from the University of Hong Kong or, more distinctive yet, from a college abroad — is the best shot at success in a job market where a big gap looms between top jobs and the level below. The college race has led in turn to an intensified struggle to get into the best high schools. They boast records of strong gaokao scorers and prestige university placements — yet high schools in general haven’t multiplied at the rate that colleges have. Xu wasn’t alone in sighing over these strains in the system and at the same time in seeing signs of hope: real change was bound to come.

III. The Experiment

When Meijie next had time to talk, it was in early June of last year, and she was swept up in arrangements for her education summit meeting in August. Among other things she and her fellow Harvard organizers would do when they were in Shanghai (where some Chinese university students would help out, too) was handle the late batch of Hsylc applications from seniors in China’s 10th-to-12th-grade high-school system. Meijie had extended the deadline for those applicants so they wouldn’t have to squeeze in work on the essays — one in English and one in Chinese — at the height of gaokao cramming. Answering Hsylc’s more creative questions would be a nice break for them, she told me at one point with a laugh and a shake of her cropped hair, and she wasn’t entirely kidding. Here was a college freshman who had barely closed her own blue books and was eagerly preparing to stage a $200,000 event (financed primarily by the Goldman Sachs Foundation, thanks to guidance from Xu). Lightening burdens, that “quality education” goal, was not exactly on any of these students’ agendas; juggling competing aspirations was more like it.

From the start, as Shanghai pioneered quality-education experiments during Meijie’s primary-school years in the early 1990s, she has been the rare student who navigated, undaunted, between China’s established educational ways and the emerging opportunities and expectations. Her upbringing reflects the deep-seated zeal for schooling that fuels but also complicates reform efforts. Almost the first thing Meijie told me about her mother (a former opera singer from a musical, Westernized family) and her father (a middle-school teacher of Chinese from a more traditional background) is that “they’re very typical Chinese parents.” By that she meant “they really focus on my education and cultivation.”

In China, a child’s schooling is a family endeavor worthy of great sacrifice, in money and time. Over dinner in Shanghai, a melodiously voluble Mrs. Tang confirmed that “when Meijie was very young we controlled her a lot, watched her very closely and guided her carefully. Luckily she was very cooperative and followed our instruction.” Effort rather than ability is considered the key to achievement — and among the most important expressions of filial piety is studying diligently (a word I heard a lot). “If there is no dark and dogged will, there will be no shining accomplishment; if there is no dull and determined effort, there will be no brilliant achievement” goes an old saying, invoked as soon as school starts — a far cry from the Western progressive interest in encouraging curiosity and play in the early years. Meijie told me her mother had her memorize her primary-school textbooks (much thinner than ours). Like many children, she was also sent to lessons in music, art and calligraphy. This kind of broader training is a legacy of the Confucian focus on self-perfection, and it is in step with the Maoist notion of “all-round development”; the emphasis is on practice and mastery, where American parents, busy enrolling their young kids in arty extras, are likely to stress self-expression and creativity.

For the reformist vision of more individualized, active learning, this ingrained educational drive has been something of a mixed blessing. It is a great core to build on: “quality education” advocates are emphatic that they have no intention of jettisoning a strong Asian heritage of discipline and humble, family-oriented commitment to self-cultivation. At the same time, the traditional emphasis on arduously conformist, adult-driven, hypercompetitive academic performance — well suited though it is to a standard class size of 40 or 50 — can get in the way of liberating individual initiative and easing pressures.

In her compulsory-education years, Meijie had plenty of old-style schooling — sitting in rows, being rigorously trained in the basics by revered teachers, and excelling. This was the well-entrenched approach observed by the developmental psychologists Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler in the 1980s and praised in their frequently cited 1992 book “The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn From Japanese and Chinese Education.” But she received new-style broadening, too. Seeing he had an eager reader, Meijie’s father began buying her books — she remembers the series of 115 Western classics he got a deal on one summer — in the belief that if she learned one thing from each, they were worth having. Meanwhile, in primary school, Meijie lucked into an early example of just the kind of extracurricular, community-oriented pursuit championed by Vice Premier Li. Thanks to an arrangement between her school and a Shanghai TV station, the 9-year-old Meijie was one of several top third graders tapped to produce a weekly kids’ news segment, which meant skipping class to work on the clips. She ended up doing it single-handedly for three years; her classmates’ parents pulled their children out, worried about school demands and exams.

Meijie moved on to middle school in the late 1990s just as “keypoint” schools, which accept the best students and are better financed, were banned from using the term in the interests of greater egalitarianism (though they remain as sought-after as ever). A lottery was instituted in Shanghai to spread the stellar students around. When Meijie landed in a merely ordinary school, her parents were distraught — and then upset when she flunked a computer-skills test. (She failed to hit “save.”) But soon they backed off, Mrs. Tang explained, to “let her develop herself because we saw how good she is.” Indeed, Meijie proceeded to reap benefits beyond Vice Premier Li’s dreams. “You have time to live your own life,” she told me, remembering the more laid-back atmosphere of her nonselect school, “and you have your freedom to think about a lot.” Among other things, she thought about Web design, partly to prove she was no computer dunce, but mainly because she was an unusually informed girl. Thirteen-year-old Meijie, former journalist, followed the news and was struck that in the midst of the Internet boom, “China is too quiet and behind” in appealing to teens. She saw a niche and focused on building one of the first popular youth sites in China. She was then recruited to help work on kids.eastday.com, a government-endorsed site with comprehensive information and services for younger teenagers.

Up to this point, which brought her to the turn of the millennium, Meijie’s experience was a preview of how less hierarchical, more flexible educational innovations might free an extroverted, quite extraordinary student — even as it also shed light on the persistent power exerted by stringent school expectations and demanding parents. By 2001, the pace of curricular change began to pick up, with private schools often in the lead, trumpeting mottoes like “We must put students in the center of learning and focus on cultivation of creativity.” At Xiwai, where I sat in on a first-grade class of merely 29, there was a smart board and desks arranged, Western-style, in clusters. A lively young teacher had the kids chanting cheerfully (and perfectly) in unison, old style, but also scrambling to find partners with whom to practice their Chinese characters; the room buzzed with collaborative work, as Xiwai’s administrators proudly pointed out.

Another day, over tea and then lunch in a cafe at East China Normal University, I met Cui Yunhuo, a young professor there who has been active in the nationwide curriculum review and implementation process. He gave an upbeat account of the progress he has seen in grades one through nine in a mere five years — though he also lamented the lack of good assessment methods. There is a wider variety of new textbooks to choose from, he explained, reporting that color had been added and outdated and often dense passages removed. Teachers are “more at an international level,” Cui said and gave me a booklet heavy on proclamations about the new importance placed on “encouraging students to inquire” and helping them “learn to learn.” More hands-on, project-based learning and cooperative endeavors are required. Time must also be allotted for “comprehensive practical activities and school-based curriculum,” which include optional courses designed by individual schools to appeal to students’ interests — a hortatory agenda hard to evaluate. At a so-called demonstration middle and high school I visited in Beijing, the vice principal extolled an environmental-studies project, which sent students to visit a waste-water recycling factory. They returned with ideas that they were eager to apply to the new campus under construction on Beijing’s outskirts. Student-run clubs are now de rigueur. There are also new curbs on competition. The middle-school entrance exam has been officially abolished. Shanghai eliminated midterms in the early primary-school grades, and weekend and vacation review classes are widely discouraged.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-2 13:46     标题: China's illiterate swell to 116M（CNN-on-line）

BEIJING, China (AP) -- The number of people in China who can't read has shot up to 116 million, wiping out years of hard-won gains against illiteracy as rural poor leave the farm and school for work in the city, state media said Monday.
Over the last five years, China's illiterate population grew by 30 million, the China Daily newspaper reported. According to census data, 87 million adults in China were illiterate in 2000.
Literacy in China is defined as someone who can read and write 1,500 Chinese characters -- a fraction of the 7,000 to 10,000 characters required for college graduates.
Most Chinese were illiterate at the beginning of the 20th century, but the simplification of Chinese characters and education campaigns launched by the Communists helped steadily raise literacy levels among adults, hitting about 90 percent in 2000, according to the United Nations.
The paper quoted an education ministry official as saying the main reason for the backsliding was that many young rural poor were dropping out of school in order to find work in the cities.
Migrant workers in China's urban centers do not have access to public education, health care and other basic social services.
"The situation is worrying," the paper quoted Gao Xuegui, a Ministry of Education official who focuses on illiteracy, as saying. "Illiteracy is not only a matter of education, but also has a great social impact."
Gao said another reason for the backsliding was a lack of adequate funding, and the fact that earlier successes in fighting illiteracy lead some local governments to abandon their literacy programs.
The paper said China's illiterate population in 2000 accounted for 11.3 percent of the world's total, but reached 15.01 percent in 2005.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-4 07:37     标题: Taipei ex-mayor pleads not guilty（CNN on line）

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwanese presidential front runner Ma Ying-jeou pleaded not guilty Tuesday at his corruption trial in Taipei, saying that his use of a special municipal fund was in keeping with government standards.

Ma, of the main opposition Nationalists, remains the favorite to take over from President Chen Shui-bian of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in the March 2008 presidential poll -- despite the charges against him.

Before entering his plea, the handsome, 56-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer told the court he had done nothing wrong in diverting 11 million New Taiwan dollars ($333,000) of public money into his private account while serving as mayor of Taipei between 1998 and 2006.

He said the practice of using discretionary municipal funds without providing detailed accounting had been approved by government auditors for more than 20 years.

If convicted on the charges, Ma could face up to seven years in prison.

Ma has professed his innocence since February, when his indictment was first announced. His backers say diverting money from municipal funds is an accepted practice throughout Taiwan.

They say common uses for diverted funds include providing holiday bonuses for municipal workers and underwriting special municipal events.

On Sunday Ma said his campaign would still go forward even if he is convicted in Taipei District Court.

"If they seek to use the case to cause me trouble or even knock me down, they won't reach their goal," he told reporters.

Ma's trial opened in the shadow of an announcement by Nationalist kingpin Wang Jin-pyng that Wang would not contest the party's presidential primary because of alleged bias in the process.
"The primary would never be a fair competition as the rules of the game were specially made for a particular candidate from the outset," Wang said Monday, echoing the spirit of earlier comments in which he had cast doubts on the fitness of an indicted figure to lead the party's presidential ticket.

The angry tone of Wang's comments suggested he may be open to mounting an independent bid for the presidency -- a development that would play into the hands of the DPP by splitting the Nationalist vote.

Both the Nationalists and the DPP are expected to announce their presidential candidates in May.

The DPP incumbent Chen is in the third year of his second four-year term, and is constitutionally barred from succeeding himself.

Four DPP candidates -- party chairman Yu Shyi-kun, Premier Su Tseng-chang, Vice President Annette Lu and former Premier Frank Hsieh -- are vying for the DPP presidential nomination.
作者: 阿走    时间: 2007-4-4 08:01     标题: Demolition ends China house row

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6520317.stm
Demolition ends China house row
Wu Ping's house destroyed

House demolition
The home of a Chinese family who defied property developers in a high-profile campaign has finally been demolished.

The family of Wu Ping gave up defending their Chongqing house after reportedly reaching a deal with the authorities.

The "nail house" - so called because it refused to be hammered down - had been isolated in a huge construction pit after other households agreed to move.

The dispute became a cause celebre for ordinary Chinese people who have tried to fight property developers.

But the struggle came to an end on Tuesday, when a few dozen people looked on as the two-storey brick building was broken up by an earth mover.

A night watchman at the building site told AFP news agency: "The stubborn nail has been removed."

Mrs Wu, when told the house had been demolished, reportedly said: "Oh well."

New law

Her husband, Yang Wu, stayed in the house until the demolition, hanging out banners reading: "The legal private property of citizens cannot be violated."

The house was the last standing on a huge construction site

Enlarge Image

The family had insisted on staying in their home, because they were not satisfied with the compensation the authorities were offering.

Mrs Wu said earlier that she had been offered an apartment in a planned new complex, or a cash settlement, but she turned both down.

According to state news agency Xinhua, the couple have now agreed to move into another apartment elsewhere in Chongqing.

Accusations of illegal land grabs and corruption have dogged China's fast-paced building expansion, and the family's resistance has been portrayed as heroic by state media.

China's parliament last week passed a landmark law to boost protection of property rights for individuals.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-6 08:45     标题: China plans 12 highways to Central Asia（CNN）

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- China will build 12 highways by 2010 linking its remote northwest to Central Asia, state media reported, targeting a key source for energy and commodities to fuel its rapid economic growth.

The longest will stretch 1,680 km (1.045 miles) from Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang region, to Istanbul, Xinhua news agency reported late on Thursday quoting the local transport administration.

The planned highways would connect China with Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.

The report did not say where the funding would come from. And it was not clear if this was part of a rail and highway plan discussed in a ministerial meeting in October.

Xinjiang shares a border with eight countries to the north and west of China.

作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-6 09:01     标题: To Fortify China, Soybean Harvest Grows in Brazil (The NY Times on line)

RONDONÓPOLIS, Brazil — For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese have turned soybeans into tofu, a staple of the country’s diet.

But as its economy grows, so does China’s appetite for pork, poultry and beef, which require higher volumes of soybeans as animal feed. Plagued by scarce water supplies, China is turning to a new trading partner 15,000 miles away — Brazil — to supply more protein-packed beans essential to a richer diet.

China’s global scramble for natural resources is leading to a transformation of agricultural trading around the world. In China, vanishing cropland and diminishing water supplies are hampering the country’s ability to feed itself, and the increasing use of farmland in the United States to produce biofuels is pushing China to seek more of its staples from South America, where land is still cheap and plentiful.

“China is out there beating the bushes,” said Robert L. Thompson, a professor at the University of Illinois who is a former director of agricultural and rural development at the World Bank. The goal, he said, is “to ensure they have access to long-term contracts for minerals and energy and food.”

Once, the biggest bilateral food trade flowed between the United States, the world’s largest food exporter, and Japan. But countries with vast arable land available for expansion, particularly Brazil, are now racing to meet demand in China, whose population of 1.3 billion is 10 times that of Japan’s.

Farmers in the United States have started planting far more corn for ethanol at the expense of other crops, including soybeans. But after the United States grain embargo by President Richard M. Nixon in the early 1970s helped spawn Brazil’s soybean industry, American farmers are not giving up their leading role in the grain trade easily.

With a far superior system for transporting crops to global markets, American farmers still enjoy many advantages over their new competitors from Brazil and elsewhere in the developing world. Infrastructure and financing constraints in Brazil will keep the competition to feed China in flux for years to come.

But the longer-term trends are apparent. At the heart of the shift is the global competition for land to grow crops. Brazil, which farms about 175 million acres, has room to double its available cropland to equal the scale of the United States, analysts say, even without clearing any more of the Amazon rainforest.

“All of a sudden you have a global market for land, a competition between several different products for the same amount of land,” said Sergio Barroso, president for the Brazil operations of Cargill, the biggest grain trader in the world. Brazil’s soybean industry is losing acres to sugar cane for ethanol production in some areas, he said, and is competing with corn, cotton and cattle.

“If you put it all together between feed and food,” Mr. Barroso said, “it is going to be a tremendous challenge.”

Expectations ran high three years ago when Hu Jintao, the president of China, visited South America and toasted a strategic partnership with his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, predicting trade between the countries would double to $20 billion. China pledged $10 billion in investments.

To some extent, Brazilians have been disappointed in the follow-up. The Chinese have struggled with red tape in Brazil and hesitated while waiting for Brazilian rules to activate public-private investments. “Very little has happened,” said Pedro de Camargo Neto, a former official in the agriculture ministry in Brazil who is now an agribusiness consultant.

But China has continued its buying spree in Brazil. The soybean trade between the countries has exploded. Last year Brazil sent nearly 11 million tons of beans to China, a 50 percent increase from the previous year and nearly double the amount shipped in 2004. Early indications are that Brazil has produced yet another record crop, and analysts expect that China will devour most of it.

While the United States remains the largest producer of soybeans, last year Brazil became the biggest exporter. This year the United States will regain the crown, but its soybean exports are expected to fall by 23 percent by 2009-10, according to the Agriculture Department.

For all the gains here, though, the surge in exports to China has created unease among many in Brazilian agriculture, who worry the tightening relationship will accelerate a development model in which Brazil is too reliant on sales of raw natural resources rather than higher-value products. And after enjoying a trade surplus with China, Brazil slipped into a deficit in the most recent quarter as the Chinese stepped up shipments of manufactured goods.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-6 09:13

The challenge of supplying China is already showing signs of strain. A soybean boom has turned to a bust in the last two years for many farmers here in Mato Grosso, a state in western Brazil the size of Texas and Kansas that produces more than a third of the country’s beans.

Near Rondonópolis, Rogerio Salles watched recently as a handful of combines harvested the last soybeans on his 17,500-acre farm ringed by eucalyptus and rubber trees. “Just because we’re producing a lot of beans here doesn’t mean we’re making money,” he said.

The strong Brazilian currency and a transportation bottleneck are conspiring against many Mato Grosso farmers. Most of the beans are trucked south more than a thousand miles along highways riddled with potholes. At the ports, some ships wait at anchor up to a month before finding a dock to load the beans.

“If major investments are not made in transport infrastructure, China cannot count on this region being a stable supplier to its market,” Mr. Salles said. “There’s a lot riding on this.”

Moving soybeans from Mato Grosso to ports in Brazil costs more than four times what American farmers spend to get beans from the Midwest to New Orleans and the Pacific Northwest. As a result, Brazilian farms realize far less for their crops than their American counterparts.

Brazil’s agricultural sector has been dominated by large investors who bought huge tracts at cheap prices, and by multinational grain traders — like Minneapolis-based Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, based in Decatur, Ill. — that have built storage, provided financing and lined up the overseas buyers.

Through his Maggi Group, Blairo Maggi, the governor of Mato Grosso, is the largest soybean grower in the world, and a major financier, with 400,000 acres of his own under production.

”It has been all about a land grab in Brazil,” said Daniel W. Basse, president of AgResource, an agricultural research consultancy.

For the farmers in Mato Grosso, prosperity has been elusive lately. Growers in the state amassed $14.5 billion in debt in the last two years. Farmers say they can no longer afford storage space, forcing them to sell their crops as soon as harvested, rather than wait for higher prices.

“You do all the work, you plant the right crops,” Mr. Salles, the local farmer, said. “But even when you do everything right, you still lose.”

The growers’ desperation has allowed the major grain traders to tighten their grip. Brazilian farmers say they are paying up to 25 percent more for supplies like fertilizers provided by the traders, who are paid back with the crop. “We are becoming slaves of the big trading companies,” said Ricardo Tomczyk, another farmer in Rondonópolis.

José Luiz Glaser, the general manager for grains and oilseeds at Cargill Brazil, said that Cargill stopped financing several farmers in Mato Grosso last year after they failed to pay their bills.

Such orphaned farmers could soon find new Chinese benefactors, who are looking to make inroads in the clubby world of Brazilian agriculture, said Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce. Brazilian farmers say they would welcome Chinese money. But they worry about China’s growing clout as a soybean buyer. Memories are still fresh of the 2004 “red beans” incident, when China rejected shipments of Brazilian soybeans after claiming they were contaminated.

To try to counter Chinese influence, Brazilian producers are working with American growers to diversify their buyers. American soybean producers organized a joint trade mission with Mato Grosso farmers in December to India, another huge potential growth market.

The Chinese want to connect directly with Brazilian farmers, bypassing the multinational grain merchants. While they have yet to make a major purchase of cropland in Brazil, they are looking to invest in improved facilities and upgrade the antiquated rail system.

China began looking overseas for more soybean supplies in the mid-1990s, when the scope of its land and water problems became clearer. Beijing has also chosen to use more of its arable farmland to grow fruits and vegetables, crops that make better use of China’s cheap labor and scarcer water supplies to generate higher returns on the export market.

In northern China, where soybeans traditionally have been grown, water tables are dropping at a rate of 3 to 10 feet a year, according to Wu Aimin, a researcher with the China Groundwater Information Center in Beijing.
“It takes a thousand tons of water to produce one ton of grain,” said Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental research and advocacy group. “So the most efficient way to import water is in the form of grain.”
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-10 21:35     标题: Chinese premier to visit Japan after years of rancor(CNN on-line)

SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- Wen Jiabao flies to Japan this week on the first visit by a Chinese premier in almost seven years, evidence that ties are on the mend after nearly collapsing over long-festering disputes tied to the legacy of Japan's World War II aggression.
Expectations for the visit are mixed, yet the mere fact that Wen is going reflects a stark turnaround in ties that began with an icebreaking visit to Beijing by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last September.

"I feel strongly that my trip has a real mission," Wen told Japanese reporters in Beijing ahead of the three-day visit starting Wednesday. "Sino-Japanese relations are at a critical stage, and both countries should make an effort to push forward ties."

Wen plans to address lawmakers and issue a joint statement with Abe expressing their "aspirations to build a strategic and mutually beneficial relationship." Military cooperation, economic dialogue, and collaboration on energy conservation, environmental protection and finance are also on the agenda.

"Both sides, but particularly China, want to put a 'floor' beneath relations," said David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

Since Abe's visit last autumn, the two sides have tried to set aside rancorous issues dating back to World War II that erupted into sometimes violent anti-Japanese protests in 2005, including a brief siege of the Japanese consulate in Shanghai by a mob of thousands.

China has long accused Japan of trying to whitewash history, both in comments by politicians and in school history textbooks.

Visits by Abe's predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine that honors dead soldiers -- including executed war criminals -- were the direct cause behind the break in contacts, which extended even to one-on-one meetings at multinational forums.
Territorial disputes and conflicting claims to gas deposits in the East China Sea added to the friction, threatening to disrupt thriving economic ties and unnerving neighbors, who urged the two to resolve the impasse.

As Koizumi left office, Beijing and Tokyo moved swiftly to get relations back on track. Abe visited just two weeks after taking up his post.
Hardened relationship"Both sides felt the relationship had hardened too much," said Dali Yang, chair of the political science department at the University of Chicago.

Chinese leaders and the state-controlled media have toned down their anti-Japanese rhetoric, responding only mildly to Abe's push to reform Japan's pacifist constitution to give the military a bigger profile. Provocative moves such as Abe's comments downplaying Japan's responsibility for consigning sex slaves to military brothels have drawn an unusually calm response.

Abe, whose popularity at home has slumped, has also stayed away from Yasukuni, although he hasn't said whether he would forgo such visits altogether.

Abe is "trying not to act churlish and looking at the long term," Yang said.

Yet, given the serious ane nearly intractable conflicts between Beijing and Tokyo, mere goodwill may have little impact. Wen's mission is more about managing the disagreements than putting them to rest.

Recent efforts by Chinese and Japanese historians to forge a consensus on sensitive wartime events broke down. There is no sign of progress on conflicts over offshore gas drilling and Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council -- a key grievance in 2005, remains a nonstarter for China, which holds veto-power as one of five permanent members.

Yet, backsliding into antagonism would suit neither.

"Abe wants to boost domestic support by handling of China relations well. China wants stability through improving ties," said Guo Dingping, a Japan scholar at Shanghai's Fudan University.

Wen's visit, which will follow a stop in South Korea, will emphasize the positive aspects of relations, including shared interests in trying to resolve tensions over North Korea's nuclear program.

Economic ties will also feature highly: Japan is China's third biggest trading partner and second largest source of foreign investment, with bilateral trade hitting $207.4 billion last year.

Balancing the need for pragmatism while upholding nationalist sentiments will be a key test of Wen's leadership, said Yu Maochun, a history professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

"In all of China's dealings with its neighbors, Japan remains the toughest nut to crack," Yu said.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-13 17:07     标题: Report: 12M Chinese short of drinking water(CNN on-line)

BEIJING, China (AP) -- More than 12 million Chinese are short of drinking water because of a widespread and long drought over many parts of the country, state media reported.

Xinhua News Agency said the drought had hit the north, northwest and southwest of China, and had also affected 14 million hectares of arable land.

It quoted the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters as saying late Thursday that the three-month long drought had affected crop plantings in the southwestern city of Chongqing and in Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan provinces.

Tian Yitang, deputy chief of the office, said the situation would get worse in China's northern areas as little rain is forecast and temperatures are rising.
He said 11 million head of livestock were also suffering from drinking water shortages.

The drought comes after one last summer in the southwest that was the worst in 50 years. It caused more than $1.1 billion in economic losses, according to state media, leaving 18 million people without adequate drinking water in Chongqing and neighboring Sichuan province.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-13 17:14     标题: Chinese PM adds charm to Japan visit(CNN on-line)

KYOTO, Japan (Reuters) -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to narrow rifts with Japan shifted away from summitry and pomp Friday, as he arrived in Japan's ancient capital for a tea ceremony, chats with students and baseball.

The trip to Kyoto came a day after Wen -- the first Chinese leader to visit Japan since 2000 -- addressed Japan's parliament with a message of friendship, tempered with a warning not to forget the wartime history that has long dogged bilateral ties.

A spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry said he did not know whether Wen would pitch or bat in his cameo baseball performance, but he said there was a larger purpose to the spectacle -- to court Japan's public.

"Baseball is a very popular sport among Japanese people, especially young people," spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters late on Thursday. "I hope that if he's batting, it's a home run."

In a sign that tensions remain, members of Japanese right-wing groups, in dozens of trucks with loudspeakers blaring anti-Chinese slogans, cruised the streets near the former Imperial Palace where Wen was to arrive for a welcoming ceremony.

"China is stealing Japan's resources," shouted one, referring to a dispute over oil and gas reserves in the East China Sea.

The combination of summitry and common touch is intended by both sides to build on a fragile detente that began with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's October trip to Beijing.

Japanese media welcomed Wen's trip, which has been marked more by symbolism than concrete breakthroughs, although caution over the future remained.

"Visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's speech to Parliament shows the Chinese stance toward Japan is undergoing a transformation," said the conservative Yomiuri newspaper.

Japanese media also applauded the fact that Wen acknowledged Tokyo's past apologies for its wartime acts and expressed gratitude for massive foreign aid Tokyo has given China.
Improving ties 'irreversible'China's official media were cautiously optimistic.

"The two sides have drafted concrete actions to take to improve ties, and this demonstrates that the efforts are not hollow talk," said a commentary in the overseas edition of the People's Daily.

The paper said pressure on Abe from "rightist forces" in Japan was still a worry, but added: "Although it takes more than one day to melt the thick ice, the trend of improving bilateral ties is irreversible."

Wen has sought to use his human touch as a diplomatic tool -- chatting with Tokyo residents during a morning jog and telling guests at a reception that his mother had praised his speech to the Japanese parliament when they chatted by phone.

Between smiles and handshakes, however, Wen has made pointed reminders that China remains wary of Japan's handling of the legacies from its bloody occupation of much of Asia, including China, up to 1945.

"The Chinese people suffered calamity during the war of invasion launched by Japan," Wen told the parliament, noting apologies offered in past years by Japan's leaders.

"We sincerely hope that Japan will manifest this stance and promise in practical actions."

Wen's speech was the first by a Chinese leader to Japan's parliament in 22 years, another milestone in the diplomatic thaw between the two Asian giants, whose economies are deeply linked.

Tokyo and Beijing fell out during the five-year term of Abe's predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, who paid his respects each year to Tokyo's Yasukuni war shrine, seen across much of the region as a symbol of past militarism.

Wen did not explicitly mention the shrine in his speech, but in an interview before his visit he pressed Abe not to go. Abe has paid his respects before at Yasukuni, but has declined to say if he will do so as prime minister.

Wen also had tough words about Taiwan, the former Japanese colony that has been divided since 1949 from mainland China, which says the island must accept eventual reunification.

China has criticized Japan for being too sympathetic to forces favoring Taiwan's full independence from Beijing.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-4-23 07:37     标题: The Markets' New Fear Factor（CNN on-line）

Chen Jing was one of the lucky ones. The 56-year-old retiree, who lives in Shanghai, dabbles a bit in local stocks, exchanging investment tips with what she calls her "mah-jongg friends," a group that gets together each week to play and chat. Just before the Chinese New Year holiday last month, one of her friends spoke ominously of rumors that China's government was planning a crackdown on stock speculation, including a possible tax on capital gains. Over the past 18 months, Chen's small portfolio had almost doubled in value as the Shanghai market shot straight up. So she decided to pull the plug, suddenly afraid it would all go sour. "I sold everything just before the holiday," she says, and was blithely unaware that the Shanghai stock index plunged 8.8% on Feb. 27, its biggest one-day drop in a decade. Roller-coaster rides are not unusual for China's stock markets, which sometimes resemble a casino in Macau. What happened next, however, was decidedly unusual. Investors in New York's equity markets woke up, saw that Shanghai had tanked, and had a collective heart attack: they sent the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 400 points, its biggest single-day drop since Sept. 17, 2001—the first trading session after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The drop in New York, in turn, fueled fear in markets across Asia the following day, and suddenly investors were seized by visions of a rerun of 1997's "Asian contagion," when a financial crisis in Thailand triggered stock crashes from Jakarta to Moscow to New York. On Feb. 28, as this new outbreak of investor gloom spread, India's main stock index tumbled 4%, Singapore's dropped 3.7%, Japan's fell 2.9%, South Korea's lost 2.6%, and Hong Kong's slipped 2.5%. This chain reaction plainly demonstrated the increasingly prominent place China now occupies in the minds of global investors. Its extraordinary economic rise has been a key reason for soaring demand for everything from copper to oil to cars, much to the benefit of multinational and Chinese companies alike. But while investors are right about China's economic importance to the world, they're clearly still confused about how to interpret a decline in Chinese stocks. There's little question that the reaction to China's market swoon was overwrought, and that this is not a replay of 1997. Rarely, if ever, has the global economy been stronger than it is now—one reason why so many stock markets have been so healthy for so long. If anything, what the Shanghai shock provided was a reason for investors—finally—to get real: relentlessly rising stock prices virtually everywhere had dulled their sense of risk to the point where "anything—somebody sneezing—could have triggered this," says Sean Darby, head of regional strategy at Nomura International in Hong Kong. "We've ignored risk globally for a long time." Indeed, before this sudden attack of fear, China's market had risen 11% in just six trading sessions, having already soared an astonishing 130% last year. It was about time for a sharp reminder that what goes up occasionally comes down. That said, many China bulls were soon back in the game: on Feb. 28, much to the doomsayers' surprise, Shanghai's main stock index jumped nearly 4%. In any case, given a day or two of reflection, global investors should begin to realize that what happens to China's stock markets actually has little bearing on the nation's white-hot economy, let alone on other countries' economies. In China, "the stock market is really, really small compared to the overall economy," says Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University and an expert on China's markets. "Participation is limited. You're not going to see a wealth effect"—a decline in consumption because people feel poorer when stocks fall—"and companies don't use the market as a major tool of financing." Investors who thus savaged the stock of, say, Caterpillar Inc., a heavy-equipment maker in Peoria, Illinois, because they feared the company's booming China business was suddenly going to fall off the cliff should probably rethink that a bit. As Jun Ma, the chief economist for greater China at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, says, "We do not see any significant impact of this market correction on China's real economy. We remain bullish on the fundamentals of the economy," which is still steaming ahead this year at a growth rate of nearly 10%. A more sensible explanation for the panicked reaction in other markets to the tailspin in Shanghai is that it was simply an excuse to take some money off the table. The Dow Jones industrial average, for example, had recently hit all-time highs, having gone up for five straight years as American corporate profits soared. There hadn't been a single day in nearly four years in which U.S. stocks had fallen even 2%, an unusually long absence of volatility. Likewise, global markets from India to Singapore to Russia had been on a historic tear. Against this backdrop, China's sudden return to earth was a reminder that risk still exists and that widespread euphoria may have led investors to lose sight of economic reality. It was certainly no coincidence that this week's outbreak of market jitters came on the heels of some disquieting economic data. On the same day that Shanghai stumbled, the U.S. Commerce Department reported that orders of durable goods in America—a key indicator of economic health—had fallen sharply in January. That followed an unnerving speech by someone many consider the great economic forecaster of our era, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. On Feb. 26, he warned in a speech that investors couldn't rule out the possibility of a U.S. recession in 2007, noting that corporate profit margins "have begun to stabilize, which is an early sign we are in the later stages of a cycle." Most economists had figured the U.S. was downshifting from a growth rate of 3.5% to about 2%, but few had predicted a recession. Greenspan's warning was particularly chilling because the truth is, the health of the massive U.S. economy—not the performance of Chinese stocks—is the single most critical variable that global equity investors confront. That helps to explain why, for example, Japan's stock index took such a hit on Feb. 28 after approaching a seven-year high earlier in the week. Toyota, Sony et al would surely feel it if a slowdown in the U.S. proves sharper than expected. But will it? On the same day that the dismal durable-goods number came out, a monthly survey of U.S. consumer confidence rose unexpectedly, and so did the latest figures for existing U.S. home sales. In other words, a painful U.S. slowdown is not, by any means, a given. And for those who are suddenly taking their cues from China, there is also this heartening thought: the Chinese have just welcomed in the Year of the Pig on the lunar calendar, which means investors in the U.S., at least, should be delighted. According to an investing website called the Kirk Report, in all but one Year of the Pig since 1935, both the Dow Jones industrial average and the S&P 500 have gone up—usually sharply. Of course, it's true that the past doesn't necessarily predict the future; then again, neither does the Shanghai stock market.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-7-2 07:17     标题: Hong Kong marks handover anniversary(CNN-online)

HONG KONG, China (AP) -- Hong Kong's red flag was raised into a cloudy blue sky Sunday as the former British colony marked the 10th anniversary of its hand-over to China and bid farewell to a rocky decade of financial woes, disease outbreaks and economic recovery.
Children hold up Chinese and Hong Kong flags on Sunday at a parade in Hong Kong.


The next 10 years could be just as challenging for the bustling city on southern China's coast. Hong Kong will likely grapple with democratic reform and face growing competition from other Asian cities threatening its position as a global business capital.

"The competition ahead is fierce. We are not only competing with neighboring cities, but with cities around the world," said Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang, a bow tie-wearing veteran civil servant who was sworn in Sunday for a second term.

A few hundred people stood near Hong Kong's harbor to watch the ceremony attended by dignitaries. The crowd erupted with cheers when four helicopters carrying Hong Kong and Chinese flags flew over the area.

"We're here to celebrate Hong Kong's birthday," said 12-year-old Jenny Kwok.

An hour later, Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang and his Cabinet were sworn in for a new term. Tsang, a bow tie-wearing veteran civil servant, got the blessings of Chinese leader Hu Jintao, making his first presidential trip to the city.

Tsang gave a speech that repeated his pledge to create a more democratic system. He said his administration would produce a green paper that would map out the "model for democratic elections."

The Chinese president spoke after Tsang and praised the city for meeting the past decade's challenges. He also said Hong Kong's "democracy is growing in an orderly way," but he didn't clearly state when he thought the city should have full democracy.


Hu planned to leave Hong Kong before pro-democracy groups hold an annual street protest in the afternoon. Although the city has one of Asia's most prosperous and well-educated societies, Hong Kongers still can't directly elect their leader and entire legislature.

Tsang was selected by an 800-seat election committee dominated by Beijing loyalists. Only half of the 60-seat legislature is directly elected, and the other members are picked by professional and special interest groups.

Although Beijing has promised that Hong Kong will eventually get full democracy, the Communist leadership has yet to say when it will happen. The British also denied the city full democracy during their 156 years of ruling the territory on China's southern coast.

Since Hong Kong returned to China, the city has been governed under a "one country, two systems" formula. The arrangement has allowed the territory to keep its capitalist economy, British-style legal system, free press and civil liberties.
For the most part, Beijing has honored its promise to let Hong Kong enjoy a wide-degree of autonomy. But critics say the media commonly practice self censorship, and Chinese officials indulge in behind-the-scenes meddling.

In many ways, Hong Kong has grown closer to the motherland -- which has been vital in helping the city recover from the Asian financial crisis that erupted one day after the 1997 hand-over.

Hong Kong has become tightly linked to the mainland's galloping economy and has positioned itself as a key entry point to the Chinese market. Hong Kong companies are heavily invested in southern China's booming Pearl River Delta region, employing more than 10 million factory workers.

China has also given Hong Kong's economy a big boost by allowing more mainlanders to visit the city. Hong Kong's hotels, shopping malls and restaurants have become addicted to the big-spending tourists. Last month, about 1.2 mainlanders visited, a 16 percent increase from the same period last year, the Tourism Board said.
The tourists helped pull the economy out of recession caused by the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. The disease killed 299 people here and devastated the tourism industry.

Although the mainland makes a great partner in many ways, it's also a fierce competitor.


The red-hot stock market in Shanghai is competing with Hong Kong for Chinese companies seeking new stock listings. And Shanghai's port surpassed Hong Kong's this year as the world's second busiest behind Singapore. Another port in Shenzhen is expected to overtake Hong Kong next year.

Still, Hong Kong is famous for reinventing itself and meeting challenges. It may have to rely on those talents more than ever in the next 10 years.
作者: fussfun    时间: 2007-7-3 10:25     标题: Mystery room discovered at China's terra cotta tomb(CNN-online)

BEIJING, China (AP) -- Chinese researchers say they have found a strange pyramid-shaped chamber while surveying the massive underground tomb of China's first emperor and theorize it was built as a passageway for his soul.
Thousands of terra cotta warriors were discovered more than 20 years ago near the ancient capital of Xi'an.





Remote sensing equipment has revealed what appears to be a 100-foot-high room above Emperor Qin Shihuang's tomb near the ancient capital of Xi'an in Shaanxi province, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.
The room has not been excavated. Diagrams of the chamber are based on data gathered over five years, starting in 2002, using radar and other remote sensing technologies, the news agency said.
Archaeologist Liu Qingzhu of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was quoted as saying the room is unlike any ever found in a Chinese tomb.

"Qin himself was very unusual, so it's not unexpected that his tomb should also be unique," Liu told the news agency.
Archaeologists theorize that because the room was built on top of Qin's mausoleum and seems to have ladder-like steps leading up, it was intended as a passageway for his spirit, Xinhua said.

Qin, who ruled from 221-210 B.C., is credited with starting construction of the Great Wall and commissioning an army of terra cotta soldiers to guard his tomb.

Thousands of the terra cotta warriors were discovered more than 20 years ago by peasants from a local commune who were sinking wells
作者: fussfun    时间: 2008-5-30 11:16

[iframe]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/2044091/China-earthquake-How-China-mobilised-its-might.html[/iframe]
作者: fussfun    时间: 2008-5-30 11:18

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ ... ised-its-might.html
China earthquake: How China mobilised its mightBy Richard Spencer, Beijing Correspondent
                Last Updated: 6:38PM BST 28/05/2008


The soldiers came over the hilltop like something out of Chairman Mao’s   propaganda movies. They charged in perfect time towards me down the   rough-hewn path, faces earnest with the desire to serve the people,   following the platoon leader’s huge Red Flag fluttering high in the breeze.                                                        This troop was not alone. There is something almost historic in the army’s   mobilisation to create order from the Sichuan earthquake’s chaos.

Approaching 130,000 men and women were involved in clearing roads, rescuing   survivors and treating the injured in MASH-type field tents set out on river   banks just days after the earthquake struck.
The result was an unprecedented wave of positive coverage for the Chinese   government’s efforts both from the international media and from foreign   leaders, more used in this Olympic year to giving homilies to the politburo   on human rights and Tibet.
                                       

                                                                                                                                       
                                Indeed it is hard not to be impressed. As I walked near the devastated town of   Yingxiu I watched as the troop unpacked their shovels and started digging a   pathway across the mountainside.
The previous evening when watching a similar scene I reflected on how   hopelessly inadequate this hands-to-the-tiller approach seemed to the task:   elsewhere huge boulders lay in piles several times my height.
I was reminded of the Chinese legend about the foolish (but heroic) old man   who promised to move a mountain by digging at it with his hands, saying that   if he failed, his children could finish the job for him. How useful was this   stretch of path, I thought, and how long would it take to complete when   thousands of survivors were in dire need of water and food in the villages   upstream?
But I saw the path taking shape, and, as I took a boat downstream, I saw   diggers and cranes previously held up by landslides miles away move slowly   up the broken road. Two army officers who offered me a lift up to a nearby   town said that work was progressing fast - Yingxiu might even be accessible   by nightfall, they said.
Could the world really be growing to love the People’s Liberation Army, the   massive force that swept Mao Tse-tung to power in 1949 - and had its   greatest moment of international fame 40 years later when it swept the   People themselves before it and liberated Tiananmen Square for the Communist   Party?
Well, when those army officers offered me the lift, a gesture that would have   been unheard of for a journalist a few years ago unless they were arresting   him, it was hard not to smile affectionately.
What has changed?
It is certainly easy to say that the Communist Party is slowly becoming more   receptive to the outside world and the way it does things, and that as a   result it is becoming more successful at home.
It is clearly better at disaster relief than, say Burma, another notionally   communist regime, and that should hardly surprise us. China is better at   most things than Burma, which is why its economy is so much more successful.
Although China has been reluctant to accept international rescue teams, this   does not mean it is not open to their ideas. It is striking how many Chinese   groups are now set up along the lines of those in the west, from which the   government is as happy as its hundreds of thousands of overseas students to   learn.
Yang Jie, a local government official and Party cadre from Mianzhu county,   told me how she had, on instructions, put together an emergency reaction   team four years ago. As with any such group, it consisted of local doctors,   firemen and officials who trained together regularly, most recently last   month, for just such an eventuality. The death rate in her area was   substantially lower as a result, she believed.
Others say that the internet and the government’s enforced co-operation with   the international media, along with its own energetic, sometimes   boundary-pushing journalists, are starting to make it realise the advantages   of accountability. Reform is coming through China’s 50 million bloggers,   runs the argument.
The SARS crisis five years ago was a telling moment: even though it was   followed by a tightening of the domestic press who had run critical accounts   of how the government covered up the crisis for too long, it was clear that   the Party was taken aback. It was a genuine humiliation that the West and   its media had accused it of lying, and been proved right.
Since then, as disaster has followed disaster - China is a big country where   many people live on the brink, and die in horrible numbers in mining   accidents, bus crashes, floods and landslides - the exhortations from the   top to be more honest get louder.
There is some truth to all of this, though it must be accompanied by a warning   that all change in China can be reversed rapidly, particularly if an   economic downturn or some new perceived injustice from abroad causes uproar.
But it is only partially true: even staunch anti-communists must admit that   China has notched up successes in recent decades that are not solely   attributable to economic liberalisation. Its literacy rates are deeply   impressive for a country still profoundly poor in places: I glanced through   an abandoned notebook at Yingxiu’s abandoned secondary school. It was packed   full of perfectly neat characters, in hand-writing that would put most   British schoolchildren’s to shame. And this is a small town in the poor   rural highlands.
Likewise, the strength of will that has driven serviceable roads into the   deepest parts of the country predate the showy transport feats of the last   few years: the railway to Tibet, the high-speed line, the world’s fastest,   in Shanghai - both, by the way, defiantly unprofitable and heavily   subsidised.
Could it be that some authoritarian regimes do indeed get the trains to run on   time, in defiance of all we have learned about the incompetence and economic   ill consequences of central state planning?
I don’t think so. Communism has been a disaster in China as elsewhere: no   recent triumphs, or rapid response teams, will compensate for the centrally   planned famine that killed 30 million people in the late 1950s. Command and   control built the dams in central China that collapsed in the 1970s, with   worrying contemporary echoes in recent weeks, disasters the full extent of   which took three decades to come to light.
I read one genuine answer to this conundrum in a fascinating article in the   China Economic Quarterly. It made the point that what communism has been   unable to replace - and has, in fact, built upon - is a long tradition that   is neither western-style democracy nor inspired by the Soviet Union. That   is, it has created a political system that is based on the paternalistic   mobilisation of an entrenched bureaucracy.
And this is what this disaster really reminded me of: records from the times   of the emperors - at least, the good ones - of officials being dispatched to   rebuild dikes on the Yellow River, or alleviate some disaster. What is   always clear is that the officials have to look both ways at once, to win   promotion from the emperor by doing his best to look after the people.
It is neither cynical nor unduly sycophantic to the system to say that   officials and officers in Sichuan know that an earthquake can only win   sympathy - and, if they handle it well, promotion. There is nothing to be   gained from trying to cover up the destruction of so many school buildings.   This terrible aspect of what has happened is surely the result of   institutional failure or corruption somewhere down the line, and is   therefore news worthy of suppression, but the grief of the parents of   China’s single children is containable by no Party censor.
But this still leaves the question of whether this bureaucratic approach,   where those in charge are accountable to those above but not below, is   really flexible enough in this modern, plural age. It can respond to   misfortunes, but can it act to avert future ones, to say nothing of   preventing the political disasters that have so often afflicted this country?
The investigation into this earthquake will be a test. Will officials who   built collapsible schools really be jailed? Will future plans be open to   advance inspection? In recent years we have seen promises to punish corrupt   officials turn into real punishments for their accusers.
To know what has really changed, we will have to wait and see how the state   reassures the bereaved parents of Sichuan that they have not suffered in   vain.



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