XINHUA (China), NEW YORK TIMES, AP (USA), RADIO AUSTRALIA, (Australia) Worldcrunch BEIJING – China is mobilizing its security apparatus and tightening its grip over the public space ahead of the 18th Communist Party Congress, which begins on Nov. 8. A volunteer security force of 1.4 million people has been assembled for the congress. Workers and […]
Tag: china
China’s Ministry of Health recently drafted a new organ transplant directive called “Management for the Acquisition and Allocation of Organs.” The directive should be implemented soon in the hope of setting up a fairer and more transparent organ distribution system as well as a national database. A national organ database is an institution specifically set […]
PARIS – In the United States, “China bashing” is in full swing. Denigrating China has been a mainstay of the American presidential campaign, in a time of economic one-upmanship between Washington and Beijing. During the final televised debate, devoted to foreign policy, Republican candidate Mitt Romney once again accused Beijing of manipulating its currency and […]
XINHUA, CHINA NEWS, CAIXIN BLOG, UDN NEWS (China) Worldcrunch BEIJING – The Chinese government likes to boast of its superiority to the West, thanks to its socialist economy “with Chinese characteristics.” For years, it was virtually impossible to publicly say something out of step with this idealized view of the nation. But now, in what […]
Worldcrunch As Sandy pummels the United States, the Pacific typhoon season has been well underway on the other side of the world, resulting in some 500 deaths and $3.36 billion in total damages in Asia. Take a look at the five storms that you may have missed: 1. Typhoon KhanunIn mid-July, Typhoon Khanun swept over […]
Last week at an unlicensed Montessori kindergarten in Taiyuan, in the western province of Shanxi, a teacher slapped a five-year-old girl in the face more than 70 times and kicked her twice because she didn’t manage to do her arithmetic. While an online video of the abuse was setting off a huge public outcry, another […]
On October 18, water started flowing along a 20 kilometer (12.4 mile) aqueduct from the Yellow River into a gigantic pit in Zhengzhou City. In two months this pit will turn into an artificial lake with a surface of 5.6 square kilometers (3.5 square miles). It has taken two years of digging and has cost […]
NEW YORK TIMES (U.S.), THE BBC (UK) Worldcrunch BEIJING – China’s foreign ministry Friday blocked access to the website of the New York Times in response to the newspaper’s investigation into the wealth of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s family. The article by David Barboza, which was published late Thursday, reported that Wen’s extended family have […]
XINHUA (China), WALL STREET JOURNAL (US) Worldcrunch BEIJING – Disgraced politician Bo Xilai has been formally expelled from China’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), and stripped of his legal immunity according to Chinese state media. Xinhua news agency reported that the NPC had removed Bo from his post last month, but only made […]
AFP, ASIANEWS, IRRAWADDY (Burma), REUTERS, AL JAZEERA (Qatar), Worldcrunch A crisis is building in western Burma where one of the world’s largest groups of stateless people, the Muslim Rohingya, are being burned out of their villages by Buddhist Burmese nationalists. Since Sunday, several people have been killed and hundreds of homes have been burned. Thousands […]
-Essay- Chinese-Americans account for 1.5-2% of the population in the United States, while Asian-Americans taken altogether account for 6%. In comparison, Jews account for only about 2%, but the positions that the two ethnic groups occupy in the eyes of American politicians are not comparable. Rudolph Giuliani, the New York mayor, once rushed to the […]
-Editorial- BEIJING – In response to a letter sent by a women’s rights NGO regarding quota on enrollment of women in certain colleges and universities, China’s Education Ministry said that this restriction was based on “considerations of national interest.” The officials probably thought they would subdue any unruly voices with such a pompous answer. However, […]
THE WEST CHINA URBAN DAILY (China), CHINA TIMES (Taiwan) Worldcrunch YANSHI – Xie Guizhi came onto the stage to a burst of applause at a community concert in Yanshi City. The 58-year-old sat at the piano and played a well-known folk song called The Waves of Hong Lake, a so-called red song of China’s Cultural […]
-Analysis- In September, China’s National Development and Reform Commission announced that China’s highways would be toll-free during the Golden Week national holiday. To boost domestic tourism, certain local governments, such as in Jiangsu Province, also passed a decree banning price hikes on tourist attractions during the eight-day holiday break, which this year combined the Mid-Autumn […]
-Editorial- BEIJING – Just like the former extrajudicial “Custody and Repatriation” procedure for moving beggars and homeless people out of Chinese cities, the Re-education Through Labor (RTL) camp system has long been criticized. There is now a general consensus that the unjustified administrative procedures of the labor camp system should be reformed. After years of […]
CHINA TIMES (Taiwan), APPLE DAILY (Hong Kong), DAILY MAIL (UK) Worldcrunch BEIJING – One week after the end of the Golden Week holiday, when more and more of upwardly mobile China travels abroad, the bills are rolling in. And once again, Chinese purchasing power is stunning the world. During the nine-day-long holiday, which this year […]
BERLIN – This truck has been shipped from China, where it was bought from the country’s biggest truck maker, CIMC. It looks just like the kind of truck a child would draw: bright red, very long, very high, with massive wheels. Everything about it is just a tad too big for German roads. The truck […]
CHINA TIMES, ORIENTAL MORNING POST, SINA (China) Worldcrunch LANZHOU – The Yellow River has no lid, why don’t you jump in…!? For Chinese who live along the river, this old expression is used when an argument heats up. But in the last few days, with reports by the Oriental Morning Post that hundreds of corpses […]
-Opinion- A few weeks ago, the world’s biggest coffee chain, Starbucks, opened a new shop in the commercial district near Lingyin Temple. This temple, whose name means the Temple of the Soul’s Retreat, is in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Founded in the 4th century, it houses one of China’s most famous monasteries for Chan Buddhism (known […]
THE WORLD BANK, REUTERS Worldcrunch SINGAPORE – The World Bank cut its 2012 growth forecast for East Asia and the Pacific region on Monday, with China’s GDP growth outlook down from 9.3% in 2011 to 7.7% this year. Markets reacted quickly to the news: Oil and gold prices push sharply lower as World Bank cuts […]
THE GLOBAL TIMES (China), CHINA TIMES (Taiwan) Worldcrunch BEIJING – What do the Chinese people appreciate most from Japan? Adult videos and their actresses, answered the Chinese according to a large-scale online survey conducted last week by the Global Times, a state-owned Beijing daily. Just as China and Japan have marked the 40th anniversary of […]
NEW YORK – Chen Guangcheng, the blind self-taught lawyer and one of the best-known Chinese human rights activists, arrived in New York last spring after an incredible escape from his village in the coastal Shandong province. He finally arrived thanks to a last-minute compromise reached between the Chinese authorities and U.S. diplomats who had sheltered […]
BEIJING – What exactly is the Chinese dream? You could define it using current key words buzzing on the Internet: “the counter-attack of the diao-sze”, meaning the little people, and in particular the poor who succeed in raising their status in society through their own great efforts. The Chinese dream is related to the “American […]
MING PAO, THE STANDARD (Hong Kong), LIBERTY TIMES (Taiwan), EPOCH TIMES (USA) Worldcrunch HONG KONG – Is Hong Kong nostalgic for British colonial times? Hundreds of people turned up in front of the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in Hong Kong earlier this week to mark China’s National Day. They were waving red-white-and-blue […]
CHINA NEWS SERVICE, XINHUA (China) Worldcrunch KUNMING – At least 19 people, including 18 school children, have been buried in a landslide in southwestern China. The landslide struck the village of Zhenhe village in in Yiliang County, Zhaotong City, where two farm houses as well as the Youfangtai Primary School, were caught in its path, […]
BEIJING – It took five long years for You Lian to understand that fine words are more important than good food and the capacity to hold your drink. He can still recall the first dinner party he attended at his old state-owned enterprise. Not only did he not understand the polite words one is supposed […]
KUNYANG – Li Jinsui is an ambitious man. He invested 250,000 euros of his own money in this insect factory, sitting amidst the hills of Kunyang, on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan. With seven patents, production officially kicked off in 2009. Since then, no visitor comes by without […]
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Why Living Rich Is Costing More And More
PARIS – The price of luxury products is skyrocketing. The quasi-hypnotic appeal of some brands and the increasing number of extremely wealthy clients throughout the world is enabling luxury brands to hike prices to stratospheric levels year after year. A pair of John Lobb shoes, a Kelly Hermès bag, a kilo of Petrossian Sevruga caviar, […]
YANGZHI RIVER DAILY, CHINA DAILY (China) , EPOCH TIMES (USA) Worldcrunch (BEIJING) – The Chinese Communist Party has recently come up with a new bright idea on how to curb rampant corruption among China’s officialdom: training courses on how to identify conspicuous consumption. By organizing “appraisal lessons of luxury goods and artifacts,” the cadres of […]
ALMATY – The sharp rise in tensions between the European Commission and Russian oil giant Gazprom is worrying the central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which are highly dependent on their gas and oil exports to the EU. “The relationship between Europe and Russia, in regards to energy, is similar to that of […]
ORIENTAL DAILY, SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST (Hong Kong), LONDON EVENING STANDARD (UK) Worldcrunch HONG KONG – Cecil Chao Sze-Tsung, a Hong Kong real estate tycoon, has offered a $64 million “marriage bounty” to any young man “who can impress my daughter and give her happiness,” reports the China Times. Oriental Daily reported a week ago […]
CHINA DAILY, XINHUA (China), BBC (UK) Worldcrunch BEIJING – Bo Xilai, who had once been destined for a top position in the Chinese Communist Party ranks, has been expelled from the party and faces corruption charges, reports state newspaper China Daily. The decision was made at a Central Committee meeting on Friday, presided by Chinese […]
We often hear about the rise of the middle class in Asia, and in particular in the fast developing countries such as China and India. However, what exactly is the “middle class”? The term is widely cited around the world, applied without hesitation by all sorts of people. Nevertheless, it means different things to different […]
BEIJING – In many countries, being a doctor is regarded as a highly prestigious job. So why are so many Chinese medical students dropping out in the middle of their studies? According to Li Ling, a professor at the National Development Research Institute of Beijing University who is also China’s medical reform expert, “China trains […]
NAHA – In mid-September, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Ginowan, a town on the main island of the Japanese Okinawa archipelago. But these were not protests against the Chinese navy presence near the Senkaku Islands, (called Diaoyu by the Chinese), whose sovereignty is disputed between Japan and China. The Okinawans were protesting the […]
TAIPEI TIMES, LIBERTY TIMES (Taiwan), KYODO (Japan), SKYNET.BE (Belgium), REUTERS Worldcrunch A fleet of up to 100 Taiwan fishing boats, accompanied by 10 Taiwanese coast guard vessels, sailed into Japanese-controlled waters this morning, according to the Taipei Times. The waters are near the islands being disputed between Japan, which calls them the Senkaku, and China, […]
Putting the right spin on your words is a science. Obviously, the civil servants who owe a fiduciary duty to the public have an urgent need to master this subject. And it helps to shift the blame on someone else, a child, a spouse, or a convenient foreigner will do. Two weeks ago Yang Dacai, […]
BANGKOK POST (Thailand), AFP (France), BBC (UK) Worldcrunch HO CHI MINH CITY – The Vietnamese communist party has jailed three bloggers Monday for disseminating anti-government propaganda. The three bloggers belong to the independent media group Free Journalists Club, which sought to outline human rights violations in the southeast Asian country. The renowned dissident blogger, Nguyen […]
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST (Hong Kong), REUTERS, WALL STREET JOURNAL (USA), ASAHI SHIMBUN (Japan) Worldcrunch BEIJING – Wang Lijun, former mayor and head of police in the Sichuan city of Chongqing, was sentenced Monday to 15 years in prison for corruption and attempting to defect for his role in one of the most damaging political […]
-Analysis- For a week, Beijing and Tokyo have been challenging each other in the China Sea. They are playing a dangerous game in a high-risk zone. Any day now, an incident could degenerate into an armed confrontation. The U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is currently in Beijing trying to calm the waters. We are way […]