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Full Report: Chinese Credit Rating Institute Downgrades Us's Credit Rating

2010-11-10T09:28:00.000-08:00

Surveillance Report for Sovereign Credit Rating

The United States of America Sovereign Credit Rating:
Local currency/outlook: A+/negative
Foreign currency/outlook: A+/negative
Rating date: November, 2010
Analyst: LU Sinan, DU Mingyan
http://www.dagongcredit.com

Rating History:
Local currency/outlook: AA/negative
Foreign currency/outlook: AA/negative
Rating date: June, 2010

Dagong has downgraded the local and foreign currency long term sovereign credit rating of the United States of America (hereinafter referred to as “United States” ) from “AA” to “A+“, which reflects its deteriorating debt repayment capability and drastic decline of the government’s intention of debt repayment.

The serious defects in the United States economic development and management model will lead to the long-term recession of its national economy, fundamentally lowering the national solvency. The new round of quantitative easing monetary policy adopted by the Federal Reserve has brought about an obvious trend of depreciation of the U.S. dollar, and the continuation and deepening of credit crisis in the U.S. Such a move entirely encroaches on the interests of the creditors, indicating the decline of the U.S. government’s intention of debt repayment. Analysis shows that the crisis confronting the U.S. cannot be ultimately resolved through currency depreciation. On the contrary, it is likely that an overall crisis might be triggered by the U.S. government’s policy to continuously depreciate the U.S. dollar against the will of creditors.

The rating bases for downgrading the sovereign credit rating of the United States by Dagong are as follows:

I. The U.S. government has not introspected on the question of the development and management model of the national economy from the global strategic perspective, which makes it very difficult for the U.S. to fundamentally change the passive situation of economic development.

After the outbreak of the financial crisis, the United States government has adopted a series of policies and measures aiming at rescuing the crisis and recovering the economy, such as: the government has purchased bad assets directly, injected capital to financial institutions and entity enterprises seriously hit by the crisis, increased investment in social security, education and energy, cut the tax rate of low and middle income families, and adjusted financial supervision, etc.. Looking at the effects, the U.S. government's efforts have achieved little success, falling short of initial expectations. The credit crunch is still proceeding and even deepening. The development course of credit crisis has shown a chart of debt crisis - economic crisis - monetary crisis - overall crisis. Currently, the U.S. credit crisis has developed into the monetary crisis phase. In order to rescue the national crisis, the U.S. government resorted to the extreme economic policy of depreciating the U.S. dollar at all costs and this fully exposes the deep-rooted problem in the development and the management model of national economy. It would be difficult for the U.S. to find the correct path to revive the U.S. economy should the U.S. government fail to understand the source of the credit crunch and the development law of a modern credit economy, and stick to the mindset of traditional economic management model, which indicates that the U.S. economic and social development will enter a long-term recession phase. The main evidences for this judgment are as follows:

First, the credit expansion policy has changed both the economic fundamentals and the operating mechanism of the U.S. economy. It is a basic state policy of the U.S. to take credit expansion as an engine of economic development. As a result of the highly developed domestic credit policy, the credit relations between the creditors and debtors have become the basic economic relations between social members. In addition, an international credit system, with the U.S. at the core, has been built up on the basis of international credit expansion, and international credit relations have become the basic economic relations between the United States and other members of the international community. Thus, the formation of the U.S. economic foundation has been changed, and credit relations have become a dominant driving force for economic and social development, the paradoxical movement of credit relations determines the direction of U.S. economic and social development. Due to the abuse of credit, the United States became a net debtor country in 1985. From then on, its economic and social activities have been completely based on the huge amount of debts. The status of the creditor-debtor relations not only influences the development model and performance of the U.S. economy, but also constitutes the basis for the nation to choose economic regime and make strategic choices.

Credit expansion has also changed the forming mechanism of United States credit demand, and the market has become the governing force to create the credit demand.

The U.S. globalization of social credit has also reached a high level, 30% of which comes from foreign capital. Therefore, the national capacity to adjust social credit demand through monetary policy instruments such as the money supply and interest rate has been greatly weakened. The change in the forming mechanism of credit demand has fundamentally strengthened the dominant role of market in the economy, which indicates the market-oriented social credit relationship would fully influence the U.S. economic and social development. The status of credit relationships in the United States restricts the country’s creative capability of actual value by affecting its economic structure. The heavy debt burden which exceeds the real debt repayment capability forces the state apparatus to satisfy the country’s capital demand in the manner of surpassing the speed of value creation by the real economy. The over-expansion of virtual economy is the result of the paradoxical movement of the credit relationship in the United States. Thus, Dagong believes that as long as the policy of credit expansion remains intact in United States, the development model of financialization of the national economy would not be changed and the key factors to induce long term economic recession would continue to play a role.

Second, the economic financilization and industrial hollowing-out in the United States has broken the normal relationship between the financial system and real economy, leading to the pursuit of the virtual wealth. As social capital was largely sucked into the financial system, the value of a huge amount of financial assets operating away from the underlying assets and basic economy is amplified in a surprising manner, making people more concerned about the increase in virtual wealth and less interested in creating real wealth; and a large number of entities were transferred overseas, resulting in a serious industrial hallowing-out, thus the country’s creative capability of actual wealth has been severely weakened. In addition, as the government has long relied on borrowing to carry out its administrative functions, it would gradually lose the autonomy to manage the economy though effective exploration of fiscal policy, and finally has to resort to the banknote printing machine, like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The improvement in the creative capability of actual wealth depends on the reasonable positioning of the financial system and real economy, and the adjustment process will determine the U.S. economic recovery and vision for future development.

Third, the U.S. global hegemonic strategy has consumed enormous national financial resources, but its own capacity of wealth production is insufficient to support its huge strategic target. The dependence on issuing national debt or U.S. dollars to carry out its strategy not only lacks sustainability, but also becomes the root of yielding fiscal deficit. A balance of state revenue and expenditures is advantageous to the sustained development of the U.S. economy. However, it is almost impossible for the U.S. government to abandon its global strategy. Hence, it will become a long-term factor to hinder the U.S. economy.

Fourth, long-term dependence on the U.S. dollar depreciation to export debt is not only harmful to the creditor’s interests, but is also unable to solve its debt dilemma. The problem of the national development strategy is that it causes the U.S. government to bear a huge debt burden; however the U.S. government is unwilling to adjust its strategy to reduce debt; rather, it believes that exporting debt through the U.S. dollar depreciation is more compliant with the interests of the United States. Although the U.S. dollar depreciation forces creditors to transfer their interests to the US, it will reduce the market confidence in U.S. dollars, which may trigger the trend of selling U.S. dollars. Hence, it will change the international currency system pattern, and the U.S. dollar hegemonic status will be shaken inevitably, which will ultimately affect the backflow of U.S. dollars, hindering the international financing channel of the U.S. government directly, and reducing its debt income. The debt income concerns the prosperity of the United States. To avoid the outbreak of debt crisis, it has to issue additional currency to solve the problem of insufficient debt income. Hence, the U.S. dollar starts a new round of depreciation, circulating on and on, which intensifies the risk of debt repayment inevitably.

Fifth, the reform of financial and rating systems has failed to fully reflect the essential requirements of the credit economy, and it is difficult to establish a basic service system of national economy that accommodates the development law of a credit economy, so as to push the U.S. economy into a path of revival. "Financial Regulatory Reform Act" is the main measure of the U.S. government to prevent further crisis, but its content shows that they have not really found the root of the problems within the U.S. financial system. The root cause of credit crisis can not be eradicated by simply resting on regulatory reforms.

The U.S. financial system has created a myriad of financial products, which attract the continuous influx of global USD capital. Foreign capitals make up the most important part of the U.S. economic ecosystem, and it is the driving force of this very system to obtain capital revenue through credit expansion, but the consequent problems are serious:

(1) social capitals are encouraged to engage in financial speculations, and the pursuit of virtual wealth rather than material wealth is not conducive for the United States to enhance its capacity of value creation; (2) credit activities have deviated from the proper role of supporting the development of real economy, the social credit demand is mainly determined by the market, and the extra credit created by the market becomes hot money that jeopardizes the country’s economic development. Furthermore, the government’s ability to regulate social credit is largely impaired by financial innovation products; (3) the financial system is composed of complicated credit relationships, which exacerbates the asymmetry of credit risk information and augments the probability of systemic risks.

The development of credit socialization should not suggest any change in the orientation of financial services. The essence of finance lies in the credit relations between the creditors and debtors. This relationship constitutes the whole of the social credit system, providing a system for distribution of funds for the real economy to create social wealth. As a result of the pursuit of value adding by means of credit innovation, the scale of social credit in the United States is in wild expansion, so that the threat of systemic credit risk becomes a constant phenomenon. With the continued depreciation of U.S. dollar, once its dominant position around the world is severely challenged, the financial system that relies heavily on the strong dollar will no longer support the national economy to operate in the current model. In this context the government will have to rebuild the national economic system, the social cost of which will be enormous. The U.S. government failed to make a master plan for the reform of the financial system from a strategic level, and the principles as well as the approach of the reform are ambiguous.

The ongoing reform aimed at practical interests is one that addresses the symptoms not the cause. Such a reform can not adapt to the historical requirement necessary for the recovery of the U.S. economy and improving the U.S. economic system. The crisis triggered by the failure of its credit rating system has almost destroyed the U.S. financial system. However the current reform measures do not address the fundamental problems and the U.S. rating system, tested by the financial crisis, is going to lose a historical opportunity of recovery. The main problem in the U.S. credit rating system is it treats the CRAs as general players in the market and does not encourage competition amongst them, and such a mechanism cannot ensure the CRAs will fulfill their public responsibilities. The U.S. credit rating systems lack of institutional guarantees to reveal credit risk cannot provide reliable credit risk information to the public and it is falling behind the development of the credit system. Therefore, to a certain extent, the credit system cannot provide effective funding to support the economic recovery and development.

Dagong believes that the deep-rooted reason for the credit crisis that happened in the United States is that the current model of economic development and management has deviated from the laws of credit economic development. Radically, it is the problem in the idea of governing the country and national strategy. The fact that the traditional way did not save the United States economy further proves that the U.S. government lacks the capability to rule the country by following the law of credit economy. The economic recovery in the U.S. depends on the change in the way of thinking of its government; however such a change is very difficult to realize whether the Republican or Democratic Party is in power. Therefore, the U.S. government will follow its lingering notion, consequently the economic recovery will last a long time and the government’s debt repayment capability will deteriorate even further.

II. Subject to the economic development model of the United States, the credit crisis is far from over, and the U.S. economy will be in a long-term recession.

The key economic data of the United States in three consecutive years since the financial crisis indicates a declining or slight recovery trend in GDP, the size of the banking industry and fiscal revenue, money supply, unemployment rate, fiscal deficit and the outstanding government debt remain at a high level. Adopting the extreme measure of continuous issuance of currency in the context of unconventional use of monetary and fiscal policies to save its economy indicates that the credit crisis in the U.S. financial field is evolving into a national crisis. The root cause is that something is wrong with the economic development model adopted by the United States. The consequent imbalance in the national economic structure requires the government to adjust its economic strategy in order to realize a new balance and create a new economic architecture for economic recovery. Therefore, Dagong analyzes and judges the prospects of the U.S. economy from the following aspects:

First, the motivational force of the U.S. economic growth is credit expansion and at present the huge debt is the result of long-term accumulation of credit expansion. Gone are the basic conditions that the economic recovery is realized through repeated use of credit expansion. Therefore, it is impossible for the U.S. economy to generate a driving force for healthy development unless it can return to the real economy and discover new areas of value creation. As of the end of 2009, the total debt, including that of the U.S. government, enterprises and household, amounted to 52.3 trillion U.S. dollars, while the GDP was just 14.3 trillion U.S. dollars in the same period. Without a massive increase in the real value of domestic production, it is impossible for the United States to acquire the capability of paying off its stock debt by relying solely on its current capability of value creation. Therefore, the U.S. economy would be bound to sink even deeper into the mire if it continues to rely on the credit expansion model of economic development.

Second, the U.S. capability of creating real wealth can not support its huge consumption. Under the current circumstance it is difficult to increase the speed of wealth growth; the only correct way out of debt reduction is mitigation of expenditure. Since the U.S. government will not adjust its national strategy, it is inevitable for the United States to increase debt or transfer debt by depreciating the U.S. dollar. The inevitability of such a move makes the dominant factor in the lasting stagnancy of the U.S. economy. In the components of the U.S. GDP in 2009, the financial services sector accounted for 21.4% while the real economy sector accounted for 65%.The total output value of the U.S. financial services industry is composed of two major parts: one is the transferred production value, most of which comes from value distribution of participating in international production. Another part is the inflated value originated from credit innovation, which belongs to bubble value. In addition, due to the high economic financialization, more than half of the profits in the real economy come from the returns of financial activities. If we exclude the factor of virtual economy, the U.S. actual GDP is about 5 trillion U.S. dollars in 2009, per capita GDP about $ 15,000. Meanwhile, the total domestic consumption was 10.0 trillion U.S. dollars and government expenditure was 4.5 trillion U.S. dollars. The production capacity of real value in the national economy is the material base to arrange social distribution and consumption. As the U.S. government arranges its budget according to the GDP including the virtual value, its revenue must fall short of its expenditure, so the socialization and normalization of debts will exacerbate the environment of economic development. It is predicted that the average real GDP per year of the United States will not reach 6 trillion U.S. dollar and per capita GDP will be less than 20,000 in the coming 3-5 years.

Third, the international division of labor and the import and export policies will make it difficult for the United States to realize balance of international payment. Based on the U.S. industrial structure, exports are mainly comprised of high-tech products, but the U.S. limits the export of technical products for strategic reasons; however, what the U.S. needs the most are daily necessities and energy, etc. In this case, imports are rigid, while exports are elastic. On the one hand, American products are not essential items for many countries; on the other hand, due to the policy restraint, it is difficult to effectively raise the export volume, all of these causes the U.S. to have long-term structural trade deficit. Ever since 1983, the current account deficit of the United States has been increasing by an average of 20% year on year. Even if considering the stimulation effect of U.S. dollar depreciation to export, the current account deficit is expected to maintain 4% of GDP for the next 3-5 years. The U.S. dollars outflow through current account deficit flows back to the United States through the capital account and financial projects, which supports its financial system to realize the transfer of international production value to the U.S. The U.S. imbalance of trade becomes an international wealth plundering system by exchanging domestic necessities with the export of the U.S. dollars. It is the barometer to measure whether the U.S. has the creative capability of actual value.

Fourth, it is difficult for the renewable energy development strategy to become the new focus of economic growth. The renewable energy development strategy proposed by the Obama administration is beneficial to inspiring people’s confidence in economic recovery, but it is still impossible to become an effective power to reverse the American economic development situation in a moderately long time, because the U.S. lacks the strategic investment capability that would make renewable energy an industry to transform the national economy. In addition, it is confronted with the formidable competition from Northern Europe in terms of the new energy technologies. Therefore, this strategy will exert very weak influence on changing the American economic structure and development model within a long period of time.

In general, it is difficult for the current economic structure used in U.S. economic development model to create sufficient material base to support its domestic consumption. Virtual economy gives tremendous impact on the safety of the national economic system.

The reform of the development model of the national economy forms the decisive factor to stop the economic recession and to realize the sustained development of the national economy in the post-crisis era.

III. Continuous economic downturn leads to increasing risks in the financial system and the trend of the U.S. dollar depreciation will cripple the value transfer capability of the financial system to attract dollar capital reflow.

After the crisis, the stability of the American financial system has not improved fundamentally; rather, it will face increasingly more serious rising trend of risks. After the financial crisis broke out in 2008, the large scale bailout program of the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government temporarily stabilized the financial system; the too-big-to-fail financial institutions benefited a lot. However, there are still toxic assets such as the huge financial derivatives hidden in the financial system waiting for effective disposal, and the future deleveraging process will take time. In addition, the long term high unemployment rate caused a rise in loan defaults. By the end of Q2 2010, the default rate of bank loans in the United States has achieved 7.32%, increasing for 17 consecutive quarters, in which the default rate in the housing loans has increased to 11.4%. Since the government withdrew the housing stimulus measures in April 2010, the real estate market has been in recession and the problem of foreclosure tends to become serious. It is estimated that the banks will face the repurchase pressure of nearly 220 billion U.S. dollars worth of real estate mortgage bond, which cannot be satisfied by the current provision for repurchase.

On the basis of 140 cases of bank failure in 2009, another 86 banks went bankrupt in the first half of 2010 and the current number of troubled banks has reached nearly 500. The end of 2010 is likely to witness a new rise in bankruptcy for small and medium-sized banks in the U.S.

The U.S. monetary policy used in dealing with the crisis has almost lost its effect in promoting economic growth. As a new economic driving force has not formed in the United States, the declining intention of individual consumption and corporate investment leads to the shrinking of monetary demand. Although the continuous loose monetary policy of the Federal Reserve has largely increased the basic monetary supply, it has failed to promote the expansion of domestic credit scale. The insufficient credit demand of real economy combined with the bank’s mood of reluctant lending during the period of economic downturn due to asymmetry of credit risk information, has resulted in the decreasing credit scale in the United States. Following the 10.3% decline in the amount of commercial bank credit and leasing in 2009, another 7.2% decline happened in the first three quarters in 2010 on a year-on -year basis. The large amount of liquidity accumulated within the financial system is mainly used for speculative financial transactions and flowing into foreign markets, which is neither conducive to promoting the development of real economy nor helpful for improving the chronic overexpansion of virtual economy.

The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy of continuous quantitative easing has temporarily reduced the long-term debt interest rate, but the consequent dollar depreciation trend will trigger the financial system’s long-term recession. The monetary policy of a new round of quantitative easing launched by the Federal Reserve on November 3, 2010 plans to release another 600 billion U.S. dollars of long-term U.S. treasury bond by the end of June next year. The direct objective of this policy is tomaintain the current low yield of the Treasury. The continuous U.S. economic downturnand the government’s increasing debt burden have undermined the foreign investors’ confidence in the Treasury. These investors turn to buy gold to avoid risk, which pushesup the price of gold and increases the pressure of a rise in long-term interest rate.

Especially for a highly-indebted economy as the United States, a large amount of financial derivative contracts in the financial system is related with the interest rate; the increase of long-term interest rates will cause another big fluctuation in the financial system, restrict the economic recovery, and increase the government’s burden of debt service. The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy can temporarily decrease the long-term interest rate, but it can also trigger the dollar’s depreciation and reduce the attraction of dollar-denominated assets to foreign investors. From June, 2010 until now, the U.S. dollar index has dropped about 6% and has depreciated 15% relative to the Euro, 11% relative to the Sterling Pound, 13% relative to the Yen, 18.5% relative to the Australian dollar, 11.4% relative to the Korean Won. The dollar’s continuous depreciation will cripple the value transfer capability of the U.S. financial system to attract the dollar capital to reflow, and the status of the U.S. as the global financial center is on the decline. Therefore, the room for implementing of monetary policy in the United States is increasingly being squeezed. On the one hand, the long-standing quantitative easing policy will only play a temporary role in decreasing interest rate, as a consequence the dollar depreciation is not conducive to the financing requirement of the United States as the largest debtor country and the interest assertion of the creditor will be the potential pressure to the increasing interest rate. On the other hand, the long-term economic downtown makes it impossible for the government to increase interest rate and regain a strong dollar policy. In this dilemma, any policies chosen by the Federal Reserve will hurt itself. Though it is likely for the current loose monetary policy to postpone the occurrence of the difficulties, yet in the long run, it will be proven to be a practice resembling drinking poison to quench thirst.

IV. New round of liquidity injection can not substantially reverse the trend of increasing the federal government’s fiscal deficit and debt burden in the long term.

The U.S. Monetary Authority launched the monetary policy of a new round of quantitative easing, announcing the release of a large amount of federal government Treasury bond continuously. However, it only has a limited positive influence for easing the current embarrassed fiscal conditions of the federal government. In 2009, the U.S. increased another 1 trillion U.S. dollars fiscal deficit in response to the financial crisis, making the ratio of year-end fiscal deficit to GDP a record 10.6%, and consequently led to more difficult fiscal operation for the government. Under these circumstances, the Federal Reserve took the measure of direct debt monetization, on the one hand, financing for the federal government’s fiscal deficit, and on the other hand, keeping the U.S. Treasury interest rate at a low level. The federal government’s financing cost and interest burden, therefore, are both controlled at relatively favorable levels.

Additionally, further depreciation of the U.S. dollar is inevitable due to the liquidity increased by the monetary policy of a new round of quantitative easing, and the U.S. government’s current debt burden, to some extent, is expected to be released. By the end of 2009, the balance of the U.S. government’s outstanding debts reached 12.3 trillion U.S. dollars, of which over 7.8 trillion U.S. dollars debts were held by the public including foreign investors. This is to say, if the U.S. dollar depreciates by 1%, the actual decrease of government’s debt burden will exceed 123 billion U.S. dollars, about 5.5% of its fiscal revenue in 2009. The U.S. base currency will be supplied with an increase of 30% on the existing basis in the coming eight months, therefore, in full consideration of such factors as economic recession and slowdown of currency circulation caused by shrinkage of private credit, a conservative estimate would be U.S. domestic inflation increase of about 1.5 percentage points and U.S. exchange rate index down approximately 10% before Q2 2011. As a result, federal debts will actually be reduced by over 250 billion U.S. dollars.

Public creditors’ interests are invisibly eroded due to the depreciation of U.S. dollar; especially the foreign creditors will suffer even greater losses from fluctuation of U.S. dollar exchange rate. Although the federal government could ease its actual debt burden to some extent via this channel, its sovereign credit will be adversely affected as it ignores the responsibilities of credit contracts and the legitimate rights and interests of creditors.

For a long time, the U.S. authority has not been temperate in its government credit expansion, resulting in large fiscal deficit and increasingly high government debts in consecutive years. Under current governance framework in the U.S., rigid expenditure accounted for a larger proportion of the fiscal expenditure to satisfy its global hegemonic strategy, which, on one side, increased the difficulty for the U.S. federal government to optimize its fiscal expenditure structure and control deficit growth, while, on the other side, made the federal government unable to have sufficient operating space in smoothing economic periodic fluctuation by fiscal policy instruments so that sustainable and steady economic growth cannot be guaranteed. After the breakout of the global financial crisis, the weak economic growth in the U.S., increase of the fiscal expenditure and the launch of the monetary policy of a new round of quantitative easing will all drive the U.S. debt burden to increase further. The pattern that the U.S. government has of a high fiscal deficit and heavy debt burden is essentially because of its terribly-flawed development model of debt economy, which can not be significantly improved by simply increasing channels for issuance of the U.S. dollar. Dagong predicts that the U.S. fiscal deficit will remain moderately high in 2010 and 2011, about 10.8% and 8% of the year’s GDP respectively. The federal debts will also increase in 2010 and 2011 on the basis of 2009, and the ratio to the year’s GDP will be as high as 95% and 97% respectively.

V. In essence the depreciation of the U.S. dollar adopted by the U.S. government indicates that its solvency is on the brink of collapse, therefore it wants to cut its debt through the act of devaluation with the national will; such a move has severely harmed the interests of creditors. The whole world, consequently, will have to face a period of dramatic adjustment of interest pattern.

The status of the U.S. dollar as the dominant international reserve currency determines that its depreciation gives an inevitable impact to the interests of all creditors.

In addition to the shrinking of creditors’ assets, the utter chaos in the international currency system triggered by the depreciation of the U.S. dollar will definitely damage the interests of all the creditors in the world at various levels. Together with the possibility of inflation in the future, the wealth of creditors will be plundered once again by the malicious act of currency devaluation conducted by the U.S. government after it suffered the losses during the financial crisis since 2007.

The value fluctuation of the world’s major currencies caused by the continuous devaluation of the U.S. dollar will push the adjustment in world interest pattern through the value comparison of the monetary system. The essence is to transfer the interests of the creditors to the debtor free of charge, and that will fundamentally destroy the international credit system and global economic system comprised of the creditor system and debtor system, resulting in an overall crisis around the world.

Outlook

Dagong believes that the occurrence and development process of the credit crisis in the U.S. resulted from the long-standing accumulation of the contradictions in its economic system; the U.S. debt burden can be relieved only to a certain extent through large-scale printing and issuance of the U.S. dollar; however the consequent decline of the U.S. dollar status and national credit will block the debt revenue channel which is vital to the existence of the United States to a greater extent. The potential overall crisis in the world resulting from the U.S. dollar depreciation will increase the uncertainty of the U.S. economic recovery. Under the circumstances that none of the economic factors influencing the U.S. economy has turned better explicitly it is possible that the U.S. will continue to expand the use of its loose monetary policy, damaging the interests the creditors. Therefore, given the current situation, the United States may face much unpredictable risks in solvency in the coming one to two years. Accordingly, Dagong assigns negative outlook on both local and foreign currency sovereign credit ratings of the United States.

After US$10 Usless Brick, India's US$35 Tablet is a Copy of Chinese product

2010-09-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

Indians and Indian government are always ambitious even their capability is low. Many readers may still remember India's US$10 computer project turned out to be a useless brick in early 2009. Indian government anounced to the world loudly that India designed a tablet of a price tag of US$35 in July 2010. The tablet news made the world astonish about India's innovation since the Union Minister for Human Resource Development of India showed the world a real thing.

But the bubble did not last long. Now the world know that India's US$35 tablet is actually HiVision's Speedpad, or a copy of it. HiVision is a Chinese company that displayed the Speedpad in CeBIT, 2010. The Hivision SpeedPad has a 7-inch 800 x 480 resolution LCD touchscreen, Samsung ARM11 800MHz processor, 2GB of storage, 256 DDR2 RAM and runs Android. It has WiFi b/g, external 3G, Bluetooth and GPS dongle connectivity and also features a 4200mAh battery good for 6 hours of use between charges. Other goodies include web browser, email, webcam and a few other choice applications. HiVison's Speedpad has a sale tag of less than US$100.

Uighur Terrorists: Western World Shot Their Own Feet Again

2010-07-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

The arrests on July 8th, 2010 of three men in Norway and Germany accused of orchestrating a terrorist bomb plot seemed like another routine raid by a Western government in the continuing campaign against groups linked to Al Qaeda. But one detail stuck out: Norwegian officials said one of the men was a Chinese Uighur, and all three supposedly belonged to Turkestan Islamic Party that advocates separatism in western China.

Terrorism experts say the plot in Norway indicates that Al Qaeda and the few members of the Turkestan Islamic Party, or TIP, who trained in the tribal areas of Pakistan see some mutual benefit in cooperating. The use of relatively obscure ethnic Uighur recruits could allow Al Qaeda to penetrate more deeply into the West. (Source)

Even US declared Turkestan Islamic Party as one terrorist group, but the organization is considered as a tool to damage China, its members and organizations are still under protection in US and European countries.

Taliban is an old story that tells how western countries lifted a stone that would hit their own feet, Turkestan Islamic Party is just another one, but I guess it would not be the last one.

India's railway plan: Loud Thunder, little rain again

2010-04-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

Last time, I wrote about India's insufficient action to fulfil its ambitious plan for adding power generation capacity. The same story is happening in India's railway system without any exception.

BTW, new data released by India government shows that India added only 9585 mw of new power capacity in 2009-2010 fisical year (india's fisical year ends in March), against the overall target of 14,507 MW.

The achievement during 2008-09 was 31 per cent (3,454 MW against a target of 11,061 MW) and 57 per cent in 2007-08 (9,263 MW against a target of 16,335 MW).(Source)

You cannot imagine that a country of 1.1 billion population could only build 513 km of new railways in 2 years, but its leaders are still shamelessly talking about improving infrastructure quickly and bragging that India is catching up with China.

For a convenient comparison, China built more than 30,000km of new railways in the 30 years before the reform. That means China built more than 1,000 km of new line each year 30 years ago.

In 2009 alone, China constructed new railroad lines of 5,461km, 4,063km of new double lines. Total of 5,557 km of new lines were put into operation, including 2,319 km of new high-speed lines. 8,849 km railways were electrified in 2009 alone. (Source)

The following reports came from here.

Indian Railways could achieve only 28 per cent of the total 11th Five-Year Plan (2007-12) targets in the first two years.

"Performance of the Railways, in the first two years of the plan period, was much below the proportionate targets as it could achieve only 28 per cent of total plan size," according to the latest report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India.

It was planned to add 2,000 kms of new lines, convert 10,000 km of metre/narrow gauge into broad gauge, double the 6,000 km of single track and electrify 3,500 km of routes during the 11th Plan.

However, in the first two years of the plan period, 513 km (25.65 per cent) of new lines, 2,612 km (26.12 per cent) of gauge conversion, 789 kms (13.15 per cent) of doubling and 1,299 km (37.11 per cent) of electrification was completed.

The report revealed that out of 144 ongoing railway projects, six projects have been delayed by over 10 years.

The anticipated cost of completion of these projects has been revised to Rs 13,055.47 crore (Rs 130.55 billion) from original cost of 3,463.60 crore (Rs 34.63 billion).

The 11th Plan size of Rs 2,33,289 crore (Rs 2,332.89 billion) envisages financing of Rs 63,635 crore (Rs 636.35 billion) through general budgetary support, Rs 90,000 crore (Rs 900 billion) through internal resources and Rs 79,654 crore (Rs 796.54 billion) through extra budgetary resources.

Human rights? 1140 people were killed by Indian railway in 15 months in Chennai ONLY

2010-04-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

The list of people run over by trains in Chennai had crossed 1140 in the last 15 months.

According to official data, more than 275 people were killed on Chennai Beach-Mount section, the highest in EMU sector, followed by 204 accidents between Pazhavanthangal and Maraimalai Nagar, falling under Tambaram Railway Police Station during the period of January 2009 and March 2010.

Source.

Superpower? 300m Indians go hungry everyday! Worse than Zimbabwe

2010-04-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

According to the Global Hunger Index, India ranks 65th out of 88 countries, with a hunger rate of 23.9.

India, which was largely unaffected by the recent global economic slowdown, however, appears to have made little progress in tackling hunger and malnutrition. The situation remains 'alarming' in the country on this front.

Countries like Uganda (38th); Mauritania (40th); Zimbabwe (58th) and many others have a better record than India on this front. Even war-torn nations have managed to combat the scourge of hunger quite well, while India -- even though it boasts of being the second fastest growing economy in the world -- languishes far behind and millions in the country go hungry.

21 per cent of the Indian population was undernourished (between 2003 and 2005), 43.5per cent Indian children under the age of five were underweight (between 2002 and 2007) and the under five-years age infant mortality rate in 2007 was 7.2 per cent.

In September 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh projected a food stock of 50 million tonne. Yet, close to 300 million Indians go without food every day!

According to the World Bank, 46 per cent of Indian children below the age of five are underweight, and the World Food Program says that close to 30 per cent of the world's hungry live in India.

According to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, which is calculated by the International Food Policy Research Institute, India has close to 350 million people who are food insecure -- in other words, who are not sure where their next meal will come from.

To put that into context, that is the same as the entire populations of Germany, France and the United Kingdom all going hungry.

Source

CNN is getting punishment, will Google follow?

2010-03-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

CNN used to be a No. 1 news provider in US since many viewers believed it was a neutral and reliable news resources. But this is gone. CNN now is a propganda machines whose reports cannot give its viewers a neutral picture about what is happening in and outside US. The best example is what it reported about the terrorist attack happened in China's Tibet on March 14, 2008. This can be found here.

Along with other western propaganda institutes, CNN's biased reports caused the angry among oversea Chinese who can access the news from both China and western world and are more familiar with China's affairs. Young Chinese students in western countries unprecedentedly walked to streets to protest the anti-China propagandas. Some Chinese even setup a website (http://www.anti-CNN.com). This website now has many readers.

CNN is now like a propaganda machines in old Soviet Union. The decrease of its market share is very predictable.

Google is now following CNN's steps. It has "sucessfully" changed its image from a tech company to a political propaganda machine. That's why it gets few supports from Chinese, even liberal Chinese, when it declared retreat from China market.

The world need neutral news media. Those media, like CNN and Google, will be punished by the market sooner or later.

Innovative: India's TATA Nano can set fire on itself

2010-03-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

TATA auto is one of India's top auto makers. When it released the super-mini, scooter-sized Nano "car" in 2009, Indians and some western media cheered for its "innovation" and bragged for its quality and claimed it would go to US and EU market soon.

Nano is far more than innovative in calling a big scooter a car. Beyound many's imagination, Nano can creatively sets fires on itself even when it is still brand new and parked on parking lot.

In the year of its release in 2009, three of the Nano "cars" were caught in flames. More important is that all while the cars were parked when the accidents happened. Tata Motors said that the three incidents were the result of a faulty switch placed near the steering wheel, but that those problems have been fixed.

Even TATA claimed it fixed problem, A brand new Tata Nano went up in flames only minutes after it was delivered to a customer again on March 22, 2010. Satish Sawant, an insurance broker, has become the latest in a growing string of Tata Nano customers to see his new car burning in flames at the roadside, 45 minutes after he bought his "car".

So far Tata had sold 26,000 Nano "cars", but 4 of them was caught in fire! That's really a high ratio

As a main auto maker and the biggest industrial conglomerate in India, TATA's quality is still so miserable. The lesson here is: Remember that India cannot make quality products. If you want to BBQ yourself, go to buy a Nano "car".

The Number of China's Patent Filings was More Than 10 Times of India's

2010-02-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

THE number of applications for international patents fell by 4.5% in 2009 compared with the year before to 159,000 as companies in Western countries cut back on R&D spending during the recession. Yet applications from east Asian economies, including Japan and South Korea, increased slightly, while those from China soared by 30%. Since 2005 applications from China have grown by 210% as the country has developed a home-grown high-tech sector. Source

International patent filings experienced a sharper than average decline in a number of industrialized countries. For example, the filing rate dropped by 11.4% in the USA and by 11.2% in Germany in 2009.

Declines were also experienced in the United Kingdom (-3.5%), Switzerland (-1.6%), Sweden (-11.3%), Italy (-5.8%), Canada (-11.7%), Finland (-2.2%), Australia (-7.5%) and Israel (-17.2%).

The United States of America (USA) maintained its top ranking (annex 2), filing just under a third of all international applications in 2009 (45,790), followed by Japan (+3.6%, 29,827 applications), Germany (-11.2% or 16,736 applications), ROK (+2.1%, 8,066 applications), China (29.7%, 7,946 applications), France (+1.6%, 7166 applications), United Kingdom (-3.5% or 5,320 applications), the Netherlands (+3.0% or 4,471 applications), Switzerland (-1.6% or 3,688 applications) and Sweden (-11.3% or 3,667 applications).

Panasonic Corporation (Japan) returned to the top spot in the list of PCT applicants, nudging Huawei Technologies, Co., Ltd. (China) into second place. Panasonic Corporation had 1,891 PCT applications published in 2009, China's Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. had 1,847, followed by Robert Bosch GMBH (Germany, 1586 applications), Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Netherlands, 1,295 applications) and Qualcomm Incorporated (USA, 1280 applications). Four Japanese companies, Panasonic Corporation (ranked 1st), NEC Corporation (ranked 8th), Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha (ranked 9th) and Sharp Kabushiki Kaisha (ranked 10th) featured in the list of top 10 largest filers.

The University of California accounted for the largest number of applications published in the category of educational institutions. Most top-filing universities, however, experienced declines in the number of international patent filings in 2009.

The largest number of international applications received from developing countries in 2009 came from the Republic of Korea (8,066) and China (7,946) followed by India (761), Singapore (594), Brazil (480), South Africa (389), Turkey (371), Malaysia, (218), Mexico (185) and Barbados (96).

Developing countries make up over 78% of the membership of the PCT, representing 112 of the 142 countries that have signed up to the treaty and accounted for 14% of the total number of filings (with China and ROK accounting for 10%). Source

Patent filing with patent offices in their own countries

The above data came from WIPO. There are also big difference between the patent filings inside China and India. The latest data was for 2007 but it was published in 2008.

According to global research and analytics firm Evalueserve, India filed 35,000 patent applications during the fiscal year 2007-08, whereas China had more than 2.45 lakh applications in 2007.

In 2007, filings by domestic applicants in China accounted for 62.4 percent of the 20-year patent applications with the S.I.P.O.

During the same period, the year-on-year increase in domestic 20-year patent application filing in China was at 25 percent, whereas that of foreign filings stood at 4.5 percent.

On the other hand, only 24,505 patent applications were filed at the I.P.O. in 2005–06. Among them, domestic applicants filed about only 20 percent (4,855 applications) while foreign applicants filed 80 percent (19,650 applications). (Source)

Conclusion

When Indian and western media often tag Indian economy as knowledge-based economy while tell the world that China is only a copycat. But China's filed 7,946 patent application in 2009, and India only did 761 in the same year. The number of China's patent filling was than 10 times of India's while China's economy was about 4 times of India's (US$ 4.9 trillion VS US$1.28 trillion).

The trend difference of patent application in the two countries are obvious. From year 2004 to 2009, The numbers of India's patent filings were: 724, 679, 836, 901
1070, 761. During the same period, the numbers of China's patent filings were: 1706, 2512, 3937, 5465, 6128,7946. This is a great leap forward. Source and source.

Comparing with China's achievement, India's so-called knowledge-based economy is simply another joke for the world.

India was even not in Top 15 countries by the number of patent filling in 2009

US thinktank: On religious discrimination, India next only to Iraq

2010-02-04T18:04:00.000-08:00

NEW DELHI: For India, international recognition of its free and pluralistic society has always been hard to come by and while things are changing,

　　they are clearly changing slowly. A study carried out by Washington-based Pew Research Centre, the highly respected US thinktank, said India is next only to Iraq when it comes to social hostility and religious discrimination perpetrated by individuals and groups.

　　The study titled `Global Restrictions on Religion' took into account the situation in as many as 198 countries, North Korea being the only notable exception, to derive the conclusion. India was just below Iraq and well above countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan when it came to social hostility in the country. Pakistan is at the third place right below India.

　　The study, which claims to cover 99.5% of the world population, deals with restrictions imposed on religion not just by social groups and individuals but also by the government. Even in the case of government induced restrictions, India fares badly with its position in the top 40 countries out of the 198 mentioned.

　　Even though the report says that "the highest overall levels of restrictions are found in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, where both the government and society at large impose numerous limits on religious beliefs and practices'' India is ranked well above them in the social hostility index.

　　While India has fared badly on both, China has done remarkably well when it comes to social hostility even though it has done badly in the government imposed restrictions section. "Vietnam and China, for instance, have high government restrictions on religion but are in the moderate or low range when it comes to social hostilities. Nigeria and Bangladesh follow the opposite pattern: high in social hostilities but moderate in terms of government actions,'' it says.

　　The report clubs India with Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and Bangladesh as countries where large segments of the population want to protect the special place of one particular religion. This is how it explains the high social hostility index for these countries. "Many of the restrictions imposed in these countries are driven by groups pressing for the enshrinement of their interpretation of the majority faith, including through Shariah law in Muslim societies and Hindutva movement in India which seeks to define India as a Hindu nation,'' says the report.

　　In preparing this study, states the report, the Pew Forum devised a battery of measures, phrased as questions, to gauge the levels of government and social restrictions on religion in each country. "To answer these questions, Pew Forum researchers combed through 16 widely cited, publicly available sources of information, including reports by the US State Department, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, the Council of the European Union, the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, the Hudson Institute and Amnesty International,'' it states.

　　QnA: Although India is called a secular country, in reality have we ever been secular?

Source:

India has a huge market? Don't Fool the World

2010-02-03T07:39:00.001-08:00

Indians are always bragging that India is a comsumer market and has huge middle class ( some even put the number of middle class in India as ridiculous 300 million).

Sales of some brands in India in 2009

For the 12-month period ended December, 2009, BMW sold 3,619 luxury cars in India, as compared to the 3,247 luxury units that Mercedes Benz sold.

Mercedes ended 2009 with 38% of the pie against BMW's 40% with the third German luxury carmaker Audi claiming the rest. From the calculation, Audi only sold about 2000 cars in India. Source

In 2009, Volvo only sold a pitiful 140 cars in India. (Source).

Sales of same brands in China in 2009

For those who don't know how small India's market size is, I give you some more data on the sales of the same brands in the same year (2009) in China. You can find the clue by doing simple comparison. Basically, tiny Indian market can be ignored.

Mercedes-Benz sold a record 68,500 cars in China last year, it said in a statement late on Monday, beating its previous target of 65,000 units.

Sales of Volkswagen AG's Audi premier brand rose 32.9 percent to 158,941 units. Source

BMW's deliveries in 2009 climbed 38 percent in China to 90,500 vehicles and 24 percent in India to 3,600. Source

According to the Volvo's news release, the company sold 22,405 cars in China in 2009. (Source)

The size of whole auto market in 2009

As auto market in whole, China became the largest auto market in the world. In 2009 passenger car sales soared to 10.3 million in China and total vehicle sales are estimated at 13.6 million, the China Passenger Car Association said. That represents growth of about 45 percent from 2008.

By contrast, U.S. sales of cars and light trucks plunged 21 percent in 2009 to 10.4 million as a shaky economy kept buyers away from showrooms. It was the first time any country bought more cars than Americans. (Source)

Only 1.4 million cars were sold in Inddia in 2009 according to a Bloomberg News calculation of data released by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers on Jan. 8 2009. (Source). That number is really pityful and embarrassing for a country of 1.1 billion population.

Google Has Business Problems, Not Political Problems

2010-01-12T21:56:00.000-08:00

David Drummond, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, published his new article on google blog. He said google is considering the exit from Chinese market. His excuse is that the censorship from Chinese government.

Is this true? Maybe not.

Google has been experiencing huge business presure in Chinese market due to the existence of Chinese search-engine provider Baidu.com that domintates there for long. Google tried hard to break into the fast expanding market with huge investment, but little progress has been made.

Kai-Fu Lee is an oversea Chinese, who is one of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet sector. Google hired him when he was a corporate vice president of interactive services in microsft. This caused a 2005 legal dispute between Google and Microsoft. Dr. Lee became the founding president of Google China, serving from July, 2005 through September 4, 2009.

Dr. Lee quited his job in Google, why? Dr. Lee said he wanted to pursue his own oppertunities in China. But some thing Google really does not want to acknowledge: Business failure in China.

China has the censorship system there for long time, even before Google started its business in China. We all know that Chinese web contents are becoming more and more open or you can say that much fewer censored contents that before. The fact no one can deny is that Google tried to copperated with the system when the system was much stricter. It is rediculous for Google to speak out moral judgement openly today. Would Google have the thought of exiting from Chinese market if its business had done well there? No way!! What I can say is that Google is having business trouble in China rather than political trouble.

Google is really of such a high moral standard? Maybe, maybe not. Chinese government acused the search engine has too much pornographic contents on its Chinese web.

I just give readers of an exmple to show the difference of astonishing difference between Google's Chinese web and its English web. Both seach the key word "Perfect-G":

This comes from its English version search engine.

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS265&um=1&sa=1&q=Perfect-G&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=&start=0

This from its Chinese Search engine. (WARNING: 18+ pictures will show up)

http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=Perfect-G&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

You can tell that Google behaves much better in US, but not so much to Chinese users.

It is well known that in Chinese market of internt content providers, Chinese companies are doing better than those from US. I just gave you some examples:
In instant messenger service: China's QQ beats any US IM service providers.
In E-business, China Alibaba and Taobao (Actaully Alibaba owns Taobao) beats Ebay

This situation is not simply caused by political reasons. There are cultural reasons behind. Search engine market may experience political problems, but how about instant messenger service and E-commercial service? I doubt any censorship involved.

Google has to admit it is a business loser in Chinese market. No scapegoat is needed, Period!

India's plans are often ambitious, But Can be fulfilled?

2010-01-05T20:46:00.000-08:00

Indians often talk about how wonderful India will be and how fast they are developing. This makes world believe India is almost a superpower. How this can happen? Their government always give Indians big hopes, and Indians take those plan as reality. But the truth is very different. Let me give you one example from India's electricity industry.

India is awfully short of electricity. In 2007, India had only a total of power generation capacity of 130,000MW (similar as UK's capacity, but UK has tiny population comparing with India's.).

In May 2007, India prime minister gave Indians a big promise: India planed to add 78000 MW new capacity with some effort during the 5 years ending in March 2012. Can this be a possible mission for India?

I found one sentence like this in an article that was published in March 2009: (Source)

"India’s track record in adding power generating capacity is unenviable. In the five years to 2007, the country added 20,950MW of capacity, against a target of 41,110MW. "

Another report in July 2009 told the similar story: (Source)

In 2007/08 (Means April 2007 to March 2008, India's fisical year) India produced only 77 percent of the revised target of 12 GW and last year (2008/09) it was only 46 percent of the targetted 7.53 GW.

That means in the two years between April 2007 and March 2009, India only added 12,703MW capacity.

Is India's plan really that ambitious? Since Indians often said India will surpass China. I can tell you some related numbers about China:

At the end of 2008, China has total power capacity of 792,530 MW (camparin with India's about 150,000 MW). China addded 90,510 MW capacity in 2008 alone. (including hydropower of 20,100 MW, windmil of 4,660 MW). (Source)

Open Letter: A Sikh Leader Begs Clinton To Intervene In India

2009-02-15T01:46:00.000-08:00

Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh reminds Hillary Clinton that her husband has condemned the murder of Sikhs during his visit to India in the year 2000, and accuses the Indian government has murdered over 250,000 Sikhs since 1984, more than 300,000 Christians in Nagaland, over 90,000 Muslims in Kashmir, tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims throughout the country.

The Honorable Hillary Clinton

Secretary of State

Government of The United States
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

Dear Secretary of State Madam Clinton,

Congratulations on becoming the U.S. Secretary of State. Yours is a very important job, protecting the people of the United States by carrying out diplomacy and foreign policy to protect our national security.

I know that you are aware of the troubled situation in South Asia. As you know, India and Pakistan have had a longstanding dispute. You may remember when an Indian official was quoted as saying that Pakistan should be made part of India. You may also remember that it was India that set off the nuclear arms race in South Asia.

You may also have noted that India opposed your action sending Ambassador Richard Holbrooke to the region and that it publicly told President Obama to stay out of the situation in the region.

You are also aware of the repression of minorities in India. Your husband, former President Clinton, wrote in the foreword to Madeleine Albright’s book about the massacre in Chithisinghpora:

“During my visit to India in 2000, some Hindu militants decided to vent their outrage by murdering 38 Sikhs in cold blood. If I hadn’t made the trip, the victims would probably still be alive. If I hadn’t made the trip because I feared what militants might do, I couldn’t have done my job as president of the United States.”

The Indian government has murdered over 250,000 Sikhs since 1984, more than 300,000 Christians in Nagaland, over 90,000 Muslims in Kashmir, tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims throughout the country, and tens of thousands of Tamils, Assamese, Manipuris, and others.

A report issued by the Movement Against State Repression (MASR) shows that India admitted that it held 52,268 political prisoners under the repressive “Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act” (TADA) even though it expired in 1995.

Additionally, according to Amnesty International, there are tens of thousands of other minorities being held as political prisoners. MASR report quotes the Punjab Civil Magistracy as writing “if we add up the figures of the last few years the number of innocent persons killed would run into lakhs [hundreds of thousands.]”

The Indian Supreme Court called the Indian government’s murders of Sikhs “worse than genocide.”

I urge you to use your influence as Secretary of State to end the repression of minorities in India.

As you know, many minorities, including the Sikhs of Khalistan, the Christians of Nagalim, the Muslims of Kashmir, and others throughout the subcontinent, are fighting for their freedom from India. In all, there are 17 freedom movements. I call for the release of all of India’s political prisoners. In addition, I respectfully urge the Administration to support a free and fair plebiscite on the issue of independence for Khalistan. There should also be similar plebiscites for Kashmir, Nagaland, and every other nation that seeks its freedom from Indian rule. It is essential that the United States use its influence to promote its ideals of freedom.

Thank you for your attention and congratulations again on becoming Secretary of State.

Sincerely,

Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh
President
Council of Khalistan

CC: Secretariat, G-8 member countries.

Source

Brutal Killings In Kashmir

2008-11-30T20:04:00.000-08:00

When the world is paying attention to what was happening during Nov. 26-Nov. 30, 2008 in Mumbai where about a dozen of militants attacked the Indian financial center. People should open their eyes and put the incident in a larger background.

In India, Hindus kill Muslims, Hindus kill Christians, Muslims kill Hindus, Government kills people in Kashmir who want their freedom, Government kills Maoists who are struggling for their very basic living, government kills seperatists who want their own rights on their own land, ........ Two words can describe India precisely: Big chaos. Don't believe what I am saying, go to use google for yourself.

Here is a report about what is happening in Kashmir.

2261 women martyred, 22671 widowed, 9843 molested in IHK

Srinagar, November 25 (KMS): In occupied Kashmir, 2261 women were among 92670 civilian martyred during the last 19 years due to the unabated acts of Indian state terrorism. Indian troops molested 9843 women during the period and the state terrorism rendered 22671 women widowed.

This has been revealed in a report issued today by the Research Section of Kashmir Media Service on the occasion of “International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women”. The report maintained that Kashmiri women have been one of the worst affectees of the harrowing conflict in the occupied territory since January 1989.

According to the report, Indian troops have been routinely involved in sexual harassment of Kashmiri women to suppress the ongoing liberation struggle. It further pointed out that although men have been subjected to the cases of disappearances largely, but women have been adversely affected because of being related to the disappeared persons as wives, daughters, mothers and sisters. The report stated that women constitute a considerable number of mental patients, which is well over one hundred thousand, due to the violence perpetrated by the troops. Source

Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga lays bare the truth of India's poverty

2008-10-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

India, which for decades after independence was shackled in the Western imagination to images of grinding poverty, is suddenly seen through the equally distorting lens of Bollywood glitz and Bangalore call centres; headline-grabbing corporate takeovers and endless seminars discussing when (not if) India will become the next global superpower.

　　In the space of a decade, the poor of India - who today still account for as many as 800 million of the country's 1.1 billion population - have been virtually erased from our perception of the world's largest democracy.

　　But enter now, centre-stage, after winning the Man Booker prize, 33-year-old Aravind Adiga and his novel The White Tiger.

　　A book which, if the critics are to be believed, lays bare the troubled reality of modern India to a world that has become so entranced by the mantra of its economic ''miracle" that it has forgotten the grinding reality of life for most Indians.

　　The novel certainly affected the chairman of the judges, Michael Portillo, who said that the book about a poor, rural rickshawallah being corrupted by his move to the big city, had challenged his own assumptions about India and poverty itself.

　　"It changed my view of certain things," he said, explaining why Adiga's book had won, "like what is the real India and what is the nature of poverty."

　　Stories have always trumped statistics when it comes to getting a message across, and Adiga's novel, which his publishers reckon could sell 500,000 copies in Britain alone, has the power to encourage the world to take a more realistic view of modern India in all its corrupt complexity.

　　But while facts and figures might be dry compared with Adiga's narrative, they are also worth repeating because they reveal how India's economic success has failed to deliver enough to the country's poor.

　　Despite the much-vaunted decades of seven per cent economic growth, and the rise of a middle class, the ''dark side", (Mr Portillo's phrase) of India remains.

　　In modern, nuclear-capable India, 63 infants die per 1,000 live births. In war-torn Eritrea the figure is 45. In India, 400 out of 100,000 women die in childbirth. In Botswana, the figure is 100.

　　And despite a decade of economic expansion, a staggering 47 per cent of India's under-threes remain malnourished.

　　Only on Wednesday, an international study found that the level of hunger in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh is comparable with that of war-ravaged Ethiopia. Punjab, the best-placed in the survey of 17 Indian states, still ranks below Gabon, Honduras and Vietnam.

　　It is this kind of poverty that forces millions of poor Indians to migrate every year to the slums of cities such as Mumbai, India's commercial and entertainment capital, where nearly half the population live in stinking, narrow-alleyed shanties.

　　It isn't just the smell of human faeces that makes the outsider dizzy, but the jarring proximity of those rich and poor worlds which, thanks to the prevalence of television and migration to the cities, are now starting to collide in India.

　　One encounter during my four years in India as The Daily Telegraph's correspondent illustrates the widening gulf.

　　I spent a day interviewing a young man and his wife, Subir and Shenaz, who made their living sorting rubbish in a Mumbai slum near the city's airport.

　　For 12, sometimes 16 hours a day, they sifted Mumbai's household waste for metal scraps - a bed spring, the aluminium collar of a light bulb, a copper solenoid from an old transistor radio - anything that might be worth a few rupees from a scrap dealer.

　　They lived in conditions in which Europeans are not allowed to keep animals. Their ''house" was a wooden box no more than 10ft square, perched on the edge of an open sewer.

　　Here they sat sifting hour after hour, Shenaz, herself running a fever in the Mumbai summer heat, nursing a sickly baby as she worked, actually and metaphorically at the bottom of India's billion-man economic dust-heap.

　　Surely village life was preferable to this, I wondered? Shenaz smiled. "Here we eat every night," she said, "and, until I fell sick, we even saved some money." She hadn't come to Mumbai for pity or charity - there was none on offer if she'd wanted it - but for opportunities that her rural village could never give her or her child.

　　Subir explained that they had hoped Mumbai was going to provide them with a better life, but that he'd spent all his money paying bribes at the local state hospital to get treatment which, legally, he should have had for free.

　　It was a story typical of the petty corruption that blights the lives of India's impoverished masses. One day, the couple said, they wanted their child to go to school and learn to read and write - something they had never been given the chance to do.

　　The couple were angry. Looming over their hovel on the gantry of a nearby flyover was the grinning face of India's playboy billionaire, Vijay Mallya, owner of the Kingfisher beer brand and often described as "India's Richard Branson".

　　From a giant billboard Mr Mallya could be seen exhorting Mumbai's upper classes to "Fly the Good Times" on his recently launched airline, itself a beacon of the new, booming India.

　　So what, I wondered, did Subir think of that poster? Did he find it an inspiring emblem of a new, prosperous India or a galling, taunting reminder of the fact that there was absolutely no chance that he'd ever be ''flying the good times" in one of the planes that came thundering over the tin roof of his shack every five minutes.

　　He didn't take long to give his answer. "I don't want to go flying in a plane," he said, "I just want enough money to eat and to buy medicine for my wife. One day I want my son to go to school. Today I cannot even afford to give her a sweet for the Eid festival. There is no honour in this life."

　　None of this is to understate the undoubted progress India has made over the past two decades, but merely to temper the notion that India is on the cusp of becoming a developed nation, where poverty will be eradicated and everyone has a mobile phone.

　　The fact is that hundreds of millions of Indians live, like Subir and Shenaz, a barely sustainable existence. Amid all the celebration of India's progress, Adiga's novel will perhaps provide a reminder to the wider world of how far India still has to come.

Source.

Indian Economy Is In Trouble

2008-10-12T20:12:00.000-07:00

India's industry, Infrastructure growth nosedives

Amidst crisis in the global financial markets, India on Friday reported a sharp drop in industrial growth to 1.3 per cent in August from a high of 10.9 a year-ago.

The manufacturing sector put out a dismal performance growing by a mere 1.1 per cent as against 10.7 per cent in the same period a year ago.

The growth in key infrastructure industries too dipped to 2.3 per cent in August 2008, compared with 9.5 per cent in the same period last year.

The cement sector declined to 1.9 per cent against 16.7 per cent in August 2007, while coal output dropped to 5.9 per cent compared with 8 per cent in the corresponding year.

Finished (carbon) steel growth also declined to 4.4 per cent in August, from 9.6 per cent in the same month last year.

For the April-August period of 2008-09, crude oil production registered a negative growth of 0.9 per cent, against one per cent during the same period last year, while petroleum refinery products dropped to 4.8 per cent from a healthy 10.4 per cent in the same period last year.

Source.

Weakening currency

The weak currency ended Oct. 8 at 48 rupees to the dollar, its lowest level in 5½ years. The rupee has taken a 21% dive since January.

Source

The currency reached a record low of 49.26 per dollar in intraday trading on Fridaqy (10-10-2008).

Source.

Stock market is in nerve

On Friday, Except Ranbaxy Laboratories and State Bank of India, all the other 28 stocks in the Sensex basket ended lower. Among the major losers, Reliance Communications crashed 21.02% at Rs237.40, ICICI Bank plunged 19.71% at Rs364.10, Reliance Infrastructure slumped 19.26% at Rs515.30 and JP Associates crumbled 16.27% at Rs76.15. Tata Steel plummeted 14.99% at Rs287.50, Hindalco Industries dropped 11.18% at Rs80.65, HDFC shed 8.98% at Rs1719.20, DLF tanked 8.79% at Rs281.65, BHEL declined 8.28% at Rs1,345.85 and Larsen & Toubro lost 8.02% at Rs889.15. Other heavyweights also came under sustained selling pressure and lost around 5-7% each.

Realty stocks were battered the worst. Orbit Corporation tanked nearly 19.45% at Rs87.50, IndiaBulls Real Estate plummeted 19.45% at Rs95.45, Mahindra Lifespace Developers slumped 17.49% at Rs211.55, Peninsula Land dropped 16.05% at Rs28.25, Anant Raj Industries lost 15.07% at Rs80 and Unitech slipped by 12.38% at Rs82.80. Akruti City, Omaxe, Parsvnath Developers and Phoenix Mills declined over 1-8% each.

Source.

Indian Satyam banned from World Bank For Installing Spyware

2008-10-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK: Satyam Computer Services has reportedly been banned from doing any off-shore work with the World Bank after the Bank's forensic experts discovered that spy software was covertly installed on workstations inside the bank's Washington headquarters, allegedly by one or more contractors from Satyam Computer Services.

According to a Fox News report, the forensic analysis was conducted after a major breach of the bank's treasury network in Washington in April this year. Upon its discovery, insiders report, bank officials shut off the data link between Washington and Chennai, India, where Satyam has long operated the bank's sole offshore computer centre responsible for all of the bank's financial and human resources information.

Satyam was also banned from any future work with the bank. "I want them off the premises now," Zoellick reportedly told his deputies, according to Fox News. But at the urging of CIO De Poerck, Satyam employees remained at the bank as recently as Oct 1 while it engaged in "knowledge transfer" with two new India-based contractors. The software enabled every character typed on a keyboard to be transmitted to a still-unknown location via the internet.

Fox News claims that outsiders have raided the World Bank Group's computer network, one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation, repeatedly for more than a year. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July.

The contract, which began at $10 million and grew to more than $100 million by 2007, was suddenly not renewed this year.

Source

India's Economy Hits the Wall

2008-07-02T04:10:00.000-07:00

Growth is slipping, stocks are down 40%, and foreign stock market investors are fleeing. Businessmen blame the ruling coalition for failing to make reforms.

Just six months ago, India was looking good. Annual growth was 9%, corporate profits were surging 20%, the stock market had risen 50% in 2007, consumer demand was huge, local companies were making ambitious international acquisitions, and foreign investment was growing. Nothing, it seemed, could stop the forward march of this Asian nation.

But stop it has. In the past month, India has joined the list of the wounded. The country is reeling from 11.4% inflation, large government deficits, and rising interest rates. Foreign investment is fleeing, the rupee is falling, and the stock market is down over 40% from the year's highs. Most economic forecasts expect growth to slow to 7%—a big drop for a country that needs to accelerate growth, not reduce it. "India has gone from hero to zero in six months," says Andrew Holland, head of proprietary trading at Merrill Lynch India (MER) in Mumbai. Many in India worry that the country's hard-earned investment-grade rating will soon be lost and that the gilded growth story has come to an end.

Global circumstances—soaring oil prices and the subprime crisis that dried up the flow of foreign funds—are certainly to blame. But so is New Delhi. Much of the crisis India faces today could have been avoided by skillful planning. India imports 75% of its oil to meet demand, which have grown exponentially as its economy expands. The government also subsidizes 60% of the price of such fuels as diesel. In 2007, when inflation was a low 3%, economists such as Standard & Poor's Subir Gokarn urged New Delhi to start cutting subsidies. Instead, the populist ruling Congress government spent $25 billion on waiving loans made to farmers and hiking bureaucrats' salaries.

Botched Opportunities
Now those expenditures, plus an additional $25 billion on upcoming fertilizer subsidies, is adding $100 billion a year—or 10% of India's gross domestic product, or equivalent to the country's entire collection of income taxes—to the national bill. This at a time when India needs urgently to spend $500 billion on new infrastructure and more on upgrading education and health-care facilities. The government's official debt, which dropped below 6% of gross domestic product last year, will now be closer to 10% this year. "Starting last year, the government missed key opportunities" to fix the economy, says Gokarn. In fact, he adds, "there has been no significant reform done at all in the past four years"—the time the Congress coalition has been in power.

Even the most bullish on India are hard-pressed to recall any significant economic reforms made in the recent past. A plan to build 30 Special Economic Zones is virtually suspended because New Delhi has not sorted out how to acquire the necessary land, a major issue in both urban and rural India, without a major social and political upheaval. Agriculture, distorted by fertilizer subsidies and technologically laggard, is woefully unproductive. Simple and nonpolitical reforms, like strengthening the legal system and adding more judges to the courtrooms, have been ignored.

A June 16 report by Goldman Sachs' (GS) Jim O'Neill and Tushar Poddar, Ten Things for India to Achieve Its 2050 Potential, is a grim reminder that India has fallen to the bottom of the four BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in its growth scores, due largely to government inertia. The report states that India's rice yields are a third those of China and half of Vietnam's. While 60% of the country's labor force is employed in agriculture, farming contributes less than 1% to overall growth. The report urges India to improve governance, raise educational achievement, and control inflation. It also advises reining in profligate expenditures, liberalizing its financial markets, increasing agricultural productivity, and improving infrastructure, the environment, and energy use. "The will to implement all these needs leadership," points out Poddar. "We have a government in New Delhi with the best brains, the dream team," he says, referring to Oxford-educated Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Harvard-educated Finance Minister P. Chidambaram. "If they don't deliver, then what?"

Disillusioned Business
More worried than most are India's businessmen, who have turned in stellar performances with their investment and entrepreneurial drive and begun to look like multinational players. For them, there's plenty at stake. But lack of infrastructure, from new ports to roads, along with an undeveloped corporate bond market and high prices for real estate, commodities, and talent, are causing them to hit "choke points and structural impediments all over. We will lose years," says Bombay investor Chetan Parikh of of Jeetay Investments.

Sanjay Kirloskar, chief executive of Kirloskar Brothers (KRBR.BO), a premier $470 million maker of water pumps, already has $100 million in overseas contracts. Yet few infrastructure contracts have come from New Delhi. Kirloskar had hoped to be part of a grand project linking India's rivers, but those plans have been on hold for four years. "The infrastructure growth we had hoped for has not come about," he says. "Instead, we will now expand overseas more than in India."

Such constraints on growth at home will have an impact. Corporate earnings growth is likely to dip, says Merrill Lynch's Holland, who now predicts just 10% growth, instead of the previous year's 20%. That slowdown makes it less attractive for foreigners to invest in India's stock market. Already this year, foreigners have taken $5.5 billion out of the market, compared with the $19 billion they invested last year. Gagan Banga, chief executive of India Bulls Financial Services, an emerging finance and real estate giant, points admiringly to China's ability to maintain its growth momentum for a decade, while India's has not been able to hold up for even three years. "Serious companies are going to grow at a much slower pace, and some may even de-grow this year," he says. Unless major policy decisions are made by New Delhi immediately to keep the economy on the growth path, he says, "India will slow down even further."

New Delhi defends its four year reign in India. "We've had 9% growth for four years in a row," says Sanjaya Baru, media adviser to Prime Minister Singh. "That is unprecedented." He attributes it to the increasing rate of investment, up from 28% of GDP to 35% currently, "close to most ASEAN economies," though he admits that a large part is from the private sector. "Yes, there is a fiscal problem, but there's a price to be paid for coalition politics," adds Baru. So having growth drop "from 9% to 7% is not grim."

Social Backlash?
Chetan Modi, head of Moody's India, says the increasingly high cost of doing business in India may force global investors who had set up base in India—especially financial-services players—to move to more affordable and efficient hubs, such as Singapore and Hong Kong. If the economy slows and inflation continues to accelerate, says Sherman Chan, economist at Moody's Economy.com, "social unrest is possible."

In fact, India is becoming a dangerous social cauldron. The wealth harvested by the reforms of previous governments has made itself evident in the luxury cars and apartments in India's big cities, leaving much of India full of aspirations but few means to achieve them. There is a severe shortage of colleges, yet a plan to build 1,500 universities gathers dust. The Communists in the ruling coalition are against both globalization and industrialization, so without new factories being built, employment growth has been almost stagnant, rising to just 2%—a disappointing rate in a country where an estimated 14 million youths enter the workforce every year, but just 1 million get jobs in the regulated, above-ground economy.

Meanwhile, few expect any bold moves New Delhi, especially with national elections due in 2009 and five important state elections scheduled before the end of this year. Thus far, the ruling Congress party's record has been poor; it has lost almost every state election this year and is likely to lose all five of the upcoming ones.

The big hope for a return to the course of reform in India, businessmen hope, will be a new government in New Delhi next year. The gravest danger is that India's messy coalition politics will bring into power another indecisive alliance that will keep the country in policy limbo for another five years. If so, says S&P's Gokarn, it's a meltdown scenario: growth slipping below 6.5%, accelerating the chances of India reverting to its 1991 status when it was plunged into a balance-of-payments crisis.

Source:
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2008/gb2008071_743900.htm

Nearly 80 pct of India lives on half dollar a day

2008-07-02T04:08:00.000-07:00

Seventy-seven percent of Indians -- about 836 million people -- live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world's hottest economies, a government report said.

The state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) said most of those living on below 20 rupees (50 US cents) per day were from the informal labour sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty.

"For most of them, conditions of work are utterly deplorable and livelihood options extremely few," said the report, entitled "Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector", seen by Reuters on Friday.

"Such a sordid picture co-exists uneasily with a shining India that has successfully confronted the challenge of globalisation powered by economic competition both within the country and across the world."

Around 26 percent of India's population lives below the poverty line, which is defined as 12 rupees per day, said officials.

Economic liberalisation since the early 1990s has created a 300 million-strong middle class and led to an average annual economic growth of 8.6 percent over the last four years, but millions of the country's poor remain untouched by the boom.

According to the report, based on data from 2004-2005, 92 percent of India's total workforce of 457 million were employed as agricultural labourers and farmers, or in jobs such as working in quarries, brick kilns or as street vendors.

The report said the majority of those working and living under "miserable conditions" were lower castes, tribal people and Muslims and the most disadvantaged of these were women, migrant workers and children.

"This is the other world which can be characterised as the India of the Common People, constituting more than three-fourths of the population and consisting of all those whom the growth has, by and large, bypassed," said the report.

The NCEUS report, which was presented to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday, recommends the government provide social security benefits such as maternity and medical expenses as well as pensions to people working in the unorganised sector.

Source:
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSDEL218894

Guardian: Down with the Dalai Lama

2008-06-18T05:57:00.000-07:00

By Brendan O'Neill

Why do western commentators idolise a celebrity monk who hangs out with Sharon Stone and once guest-edited French Vogue?

Has there ever been a political figure more ridiculous than the Dalai Lama? This is the "humble monk" who forswears worldly goods in favour of living a simple life dressed in maroon robes. Yet in 1992 he guest-edited French Vogue, the bible of the decadent high-fashion classes, which is packed with pictures of the half-starved daughters of the aristocracy modelling skirts and shirts that most of us could never afford.

He claims to be the current incarnation of the Tulkus line of Buddhist masters, who are "exempt from the wheel of death and rebirth". Yet he's best known for hanging out with clueless western celebs like Richard Gere and Sharon Stone (who is still most famous for showing her vagina on the big screen). Stone once introduced the Dalai Lama at a glittering fundraising ball as "Mr Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!"

The Dalai Lama says he wants Tibetan autonomy and political independence. Yet he allows himself to be used as a tool by western powers keen to humiliate China. Between the late 1950s and 1974, he is alleged to have received around $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year, from the CIA. He has also been, according to the same reporter, "remarkably nepotistic", promoting his brothers and their wives to positions of extraordinary power in his fiefdom-in-exile in Dharamsala, northern India.

He poses as the quirky, giggly, modern monk who once auctioned his Land Rover on eBay for $80,000 and has even done an advert for Apple (quite what skinny white computers have got to do with Buddhism is anybody's guess). Yet in truth he is a product of the crushing feudalism of archaic, pre-modern Tibet, where an elite of Buddhist monks treated the masses as serfs and ruthlessly punished them if they stepped out of line.

The Dalai Lama demands religious freedom. Yet he persecutes a Buddhist sect that worships a deity called Dorje Shugden. He outlawed praying to Dorje Shugden in 1996, and those who defied his writ were thrown out of their jobs, mocked in the streets and even had their homes smashed up by heavy-handed officials from his government-in-exile. When worshippers complained about their treatment, they were told by representatives of the Dalai Lama that "concepts like democracy and freedom of religion are empty when it comes to the wellbeing of the Dalai Lama".

As the Dalai Lama tours Britain, lots of people are asking: why won't Brown receive him at Downing Street? I have a different question: why should Brown, who for all his troubles is still the head of an elected political party, meet with an authoritarian, fame-chasing, Apple-loving monk?

The Dalai Lama has effectively been turned into a cartoon good guy. In America and western Europe, where backward anti-modern sentiments are widespread amongst self-loathing sections of the educated and the elite, the Dalai Lama has been embraced as a living, breathing representative of unsullied goodness. Despite the fact that he advertises Apple, guest-edits Vogue and drives a Land Rover, he is held up as evidence that living the simple eastern life is preferable to, in the words of Philip Rawson, westerners' "gradually more pointless pursuit of material satisfactions". Just as earlier generations of disillusioned aristocrats fell in love with a fictional version of Tibet (Shangri-La), so contemporary un-progressives idolise a fictional image of the Dalai Lama.

Most strikingly, the Dalai Lama is used as a battering ram by western governments in their culture war with China. The reason he is flattered by world leaders and bankrolled by the CIA is not because these institutions care very much for liberty in Tibet, but rather because they want to ratchet up international pressure on their new competitors in world politics: the Chinese. You don't have to be a defender of the authoritarian regime in Beijing (and I most certainly am not) to see that such global sabre-rattling is more likely to entrench tensions between the Tibetan people and China, and increase instability in world affairs, rather than herald anything like a new era of freedom in the east.

Far from "helping Tibet", the slavish western worshippers of the Dalai Lama are helping to stifle the development of a real, lively movement for liberty and democracy in the Tibetan regions. One author on the Tibetan independence movement argues that "the Dalai Lama's role as ultimate spiritual authority is holding back the political process of democratisation", since "the assumption that he occupies the correct moral ground from a spiritual perspective means that any challenge to his political authority may be interpreted as anti-religious".

At least one reason why the Dalai Lama can pose as "the ultimate spiritual authority" and all-round supreme leader of Tibetans and their future is because influential elements in the west have empowered him to play that role. In doing so, they have been complicit in the infantilisation of the Tibetan people. Tibetans now suffer the double horror of being ruled by undemocratic Chinese officials on one hand, and demeaned by the Dalai Lama and his western supporters on the other.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/29/downwiththedalailama

Video: Free Iraq, Free Tibet, Very Good Cause!!

2008-05-10T05:38:00.000-07:00

The Real US Deficit With China – Knowledge

2008-05-01T16:58:00.000-07:00

Americans are out of touch with today's China. It's a knowledge deficit that carries more weight in the long-term bilateral relationships between China and the United States than the ballooning US trade deficit with China. And as China makes a comeback on the world stage, it's one that the US should address.

Chinese visitors to the US have shared the shock of witnessing a severe dichotomy between how much Americans seem to talk about China and yet how little they know about it. The US status as the world's superpower, coupled with its location, warrants people this type of benign negligence.

But what about those experts who have the power to impose their perceptions of China on others? All too often China experts in the US cannot even speak the language. How can they claim to understand a culture without knowing how its people communicate?

This knowledge deficit accounts directly for widespread and deep-rooted misperceptions about China.

There are three faulty, recurring talking points in the American media.

First, China is a rising power, and a rising power is dangerous. The first part of this argument is incomplete, and the latter part is misplaced. China is not only a rising power; it is a returning power. China, as a united continental power, has existed for more than 2,000 years.

As a returning player, China is composed, restrained, and mature, just like a former champion returning to the title game after a short lapse. Also, if history is any guide, Chinese-ruling regimes have not been considered aggressive or expansive; they were famous for building walls. This fact alone should call into question the comparison of China's current resurgence with Japan's and Germany's disastrous rising path before World War II.

Second, China is a Communist country, and Communism is evil. Repeatedly placed upon China by media commentators, most notably CNN's anchorman Lou Dobbs, this characterization is both simplistic and utterly misleading.

To today's China, Marxism is as foreign as liberal democracy. When you look back at China's past, no alien cultures have uprooted Chinese tradition; instead, they were either localized, or submerged. China can still be Chinese without the Communism title.

Likewise, today's ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could easily be renamed the Chinese Confucian Party (CCP) without changing much of its ideological belief or organizational structure, or even its acronym for that matter.

Both the "ruling by virtue" policy promoted by former President Jiang Zemin and the "harmonious society" guideline proposed by current leader Hu Jintao were derived more from the Confucian doctrine than from the Marxist ideology. Singling out "Communist" as the definer confuses the reality.

Third, Tiananmen Square in 1989 is an iconic image that lingers in the minds of the Chinese. American observers' obsession with this tragic event reflects how deep their perception gap about China runs. There is no question that what happened that summer was historic. However, it was a generation ago, and sea changes have occurred since then.

Those who were born in 1989 are turning 19. What this new Chinese generation cares about is not the guy who blocked those tanks, but the Chinese Super Girl Singer and Yao Ming. America's unyielding interest in Tiananmen is out of touch. Is the Watergate scandal still the dominant issue facing the US today?

This lack of updated information about China becomes more problematic in a larger context. Chinese students are required to study English beginning in primary school. Students are exposed to both American culture and the Western way of thinking by college. For at least two decades, tens of thousands of the best and the brightest Chinese students attend American's top-tier graduate schools, channeling back the most updated perceptions and information about the US.

Although the number of American students studying in China witnessed a huge jump over the past few years, the accumulated knowledge deficits and language barriers are still immense.

This imbalance of knowledge, just like the imbalance of trade, is unsustainable. With the trade problem, Chinese leaders outlined a "win-win partner" scenario, and American policymakers have mapped out the "responsible stakeholder" blueprint. However, no strategy will be feasible if the two parties cannot understand each other well enough to weather the uncertainties ahead.

It is highly probable that the next generation of Americans will live in a world where China is the largest economic power. Are they prepared? When and how are they going to fix this current knowledge deficit with China?

• Xu Wu is an assistant professor in strategic media and public relations at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He is the author of "Chinese Cyber Nationalism."

The article comes from http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0501/p09s02-coop.html

20000 Were Killed by Trains in Mumbai in 5 Years

2008-04-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

Indian media often shout the human rights and democracy in India. But so what? A recent report shows that more than 20,000 people were killed by trains in Mumbai alone in 5 years.

Yes, I am not wrong. It is astonishing 20,000 ceased lives in India's finnacial captial and most rich city in a short 5 years. More ridiculously, If I am not wrong, the public transportation system in this "shining" city should be in the hands of an elected government.

India's Central and Western Railway was forced this week to release the harrowing data, showing at least 20,706 people have died over the past five years, after a Mumbai activist, Chetan Kothari, filed a request under the country's Right to Information Act.

The maximum deaths are due to people falling off crowded trains and electrocution of people sitting on the top of the train," Sharma said. He said many others were hit by trains when they tried to run across the tracks instead of using bridges.
. Source.

India, Please Take Care of Human Lives Before Talking Any Other Rights.

Video: Innocent Chinese killed by Riots in Lhasa, Xizang (Tibet)

2008-04-22T17:46:00.000-07:00

Warning: Bloody and violent.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VF65NsxV_to

This is a recently released video. Those innocent people are Han, Muslims and Zang (Tibetan) people. They were killed by violent Dala Lama followers during the riots in March 2008, which Dala Lama and western media called "peaceful protest".

A Chinese Student lectures to French People During Demonstration, (in French)

2008-04-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

I don't understand French language. But I saw Chinese translation of the lecture. He talked about the media bias against China and information manipulation by some politicians. I personally think it is a good one. I hope some French people can post their comments here. I prefer comments in English, but those in French are also welcomed.

The following is the Chinese version of his lecture.

　　女士们，先生们，亲爱的中法朋友们，你们好！

　　我想首先感谢巴黎人民和巴黎市警察局给了我们今天这次机会让我们聚集于此。这是罕见的一次，也是欧洲和法国历史上最大的华人集会。

　　我想代表从别的城市，乘坐大巴、火车和汽车，从几百公里以外自费赶来的朋友们说几句话。很多朋友没有能与我们相聚于此，但是我想替他们表达他们与我们一样的对中国、对法国、对法国人民，以及对中法友谊的关注。

　　在这次对中国的妖魔化的扭曲报道事件中，我们，全世界的中国留学生，我们感觉很痛，我们的感情受到了伤害，但是我们不怪法国人民，因为造成这样结果的责任人不是你们，而是一些不负责任的媒体和职业煽动家。

　　像所有行业一样，记者和媒体有自己要遵守的职业道德。媒体要求公正，客观，对所报道内容的核实，以及评论的适中。无论如何，也不能诽谤和诬蔑，没有证据地责难，扭曲事实。

　　在对最近发生的事情报道中，一些记者超出了他们原本的报道角色，完全变成了自认为拥有绝对真理的批判家，甚至把事件可笑地简单化。一个弱小而善良的受害者和一个巨大而残忍的暴徒。他们的角色从一开始就这样人为地被分配好了。

　　然后，记者们找寻各种方式和手段来证明这两个角色。比如说，选择性的阐述历史，认为中国的革命对中国不可分割的一部分是“侵略”，而故意不说95%受煎熬的藏人的黑暗的政教合一，把尼泊尔的警察当成是中国警察，用几十年前的照片来说今天的事情，传播根本没有验证的信息，比如根本没有可信度的所谓死亡人数，以及选用一些别有用心的人的口述。

　　那些外国游客的描述，和他们拍到的视频让我们看到暴徒对无故路人进行令人发指的暴力，没有一个媒体说这是对无辜者的施暴。更有甚者，一些不负责任的媒体制造并强迫人们接受一个根本没有任何可信和公正证据的“血腥镇压”的假设。

　　媒体很少邀请中国人在节目中阐述他们的观点，即使有也是把他放在被告的位置上，而另一方的则是在数量上几倍于他的“法官”。是，你可以批评中国政府在一段时间里不允许记者入藏，但是不能捏造不知道的事情。

　　这种处理西藏暴乱信息的方式，是一种媒体暴力，一种意识形态的欺骗行为，一种话语权的霸权，一种扭曲事实的宣传，一种无耻的欺骗。

　　首先受害者是法国人民，他们是多么的具有怜悯心和博爱，他们相信媒体，可不幸的是，他们被操纵和欺骗了。

　　西方的信息模式本来还是人们的一种效仿模式，它现在不再是了。没有人有权力操纵大众舆论，不能在中国，也不能在世界上任何地方。这是在所谓言论自由模式中的另一种压制言论自由的方式。

　　还有一些作为法国精英的政客的思维惰性，让我们无比震惊。

　　所谓人权，对某些人来说是圣战的号角，和一切有政治目的不负责任的煽动的盾牌，比如说对于罗伯特·梅纳尔（“无疆界记者”组织主席）。为什么此人在官塔那摩监狱里的酷刑不断重复，在伊拉克人被美军士兵侮辱的时候消失了？这是不是一种选择性的失明呢？

　　联合国教科文组织终止了对“无疆界记者”的支持，在一份公告中，联合国教科文组织解释说，无疆界记者多次在无客观所言地报道某些国家的过程中丧失了记者职业道德。

　　为什么呢？

　　从互联网上，同时也是我们的罗伯特先生承认的信息中，我们了解到“无疆界记者”的财政支持是源于一些与美国中央情报关系密切的组织。

　　我们，海外的中国学生，我们很心痛，我们的感情受到了伤害，但是我们并不怨恨法国人。

　　我们是两个截然不同的世界之间经验与信息交换的桥梁，我们也是这场文化、思想，尤其是政治冲突最先的受害者。

　　在国内的中国人非常相信我们这些留学生对国外的见解。他们对于国外的认识和印象取决于这个留学生群体的感觉。

　　面对捏造或者说传递虚假消息的西方媒体的指责，我们这些学生中的很多人开始反击，在互联网上辩论并呼唤报道的真实性。我们都注意到，被某些媒体 “喂饱了” 的有些法国人对于中国有着很深的偏见。

　　在抵制奥运，抵制中国，所谓自由西藏的叫喊声中，中国人民对西方世界的审视和不信任正在增长。中国政府的努力还远没有达到尽善尽美的地步，说它是世界上最完善的和说它是世界上最差的同样可笑。但我们这一代，我们这些20岁到30岁的年轻人，从我们年幼时起，我们就一直生活在中国生活水平不断提高及自由度不断开放的环境中。

　　我们很惊讶，在这一切都向好的方面发展的时刻，在这个我们生活比以前更好的时候，国外才有越来越多的人想把我们从所谓的“世界上最大的独裁”中“拯救”出来！我想问，你们以前在哪儿？我们这些在西方求学的中国人，我们对未来充满了自信。的确，中国还有很多事情要做，而我们，我们中国人，更是对这些进步的实现有着前所未有的信心。

　　中国有另一种文化，另一种历史，另一个体积。社会学不是一种像数学精确的科学。在这方面，要成为一种 “普遍的典范” 有太多的变数。

　　来中国吧！来看看一个真实的，完整的中国，一个很多西方媒体不会展现给你们的中国，来西藏吧！用你们的眼睛来见证那个所谓的“文化灭绝”，是否这种灭绝真的存在，是否藏语正在“消失”，那些喇嘛们是不是可以自由的信仰他们的宗教，西藏人是不是比在达赖的神权统治下过得更好！和那些上了年纪的西藏人聊聊，谈谈他们永远无法忘记的“佛教天堂”。我们需要直接的交流，更多的知识交换，我们会继续对此作出贡献！

　　我们中国留学生支持奥运，支持奥运在中国举行，这个占人类五分之一人口的国家有资格承办奥运会。

　　奥运是属于谁的？奥运是属于您的，属于我的，属于我们的，属于我们大家，属于全世界的人民。这不是一场政治游戏。亲爱的政客们，反对中国的那些政治势力的走卒们，请停止你们对于奥运的污染。

　　中国作为东道主国家，想为全世界人民送上一份最好的礼物。成千上万的中国人呕心沥血多年，就是为了这一天。他们正敞开怀抱欢迎世界各国的人们。

　　当奥运圣火在世界各地传递的时候，所传达的是同一条信息，那就是欢迎你们的到来，中国人民期待和你们一起庆祝这个充满人性关爱的盛会。

　　当有些媒体提到，这次圣火传递失败是给中国的一记耳光。当代表着爱与和平的圣火，受到一些专门抗议者的侮辱行径时，我认为这确实是一记耳光，但不是给中国的，而是给中国人民的，给法国人民的，给全世界所有热爱奥运的人民的。

　　很多法国人似乎对中国有一种恐惧，这种恐惧来自于对中国的无知。这也是为什么我们希望你们可以直接和我们沟通，通过我们，热爱并希望巩固中法友谊的桥梁，来进一步了解中国。

　　中国和她的文化注定了我们爱好和平的本质。自秦朝统一六国后，中国从此结束了原来分裂的状态，成为一个完整独立的国家。我们便属于一个大家庭。

　　我认为这是一个具有5000年历史的文化的高度。这会令人担忧？但是文化是鲜活的具有生命力的。当你们在中国饭店使用筷子的时候，中国文化正向你们充分地展开它的怀抱。

　　妖魔化中国只会让中国人愈发远离西方世界，只会加剧人民间的距离。

　　请让我们好好沟通！

　　我们想给你们其他一个信息。我们中国留学生，非常诚恳地希望中法人民之间不要有敌对情绪，因为不管怎样这都是不理性的，也是没用的。了解两种不同文化的我们，希望成为这两国人民的一座桥梁，一个信息沟通点。我们向你们诉说的是中国人民的真实想法和感受，我们同时也会传达法国人民对中国善意的关注。请相信我，这座桥，将会前所未有的坚固，特别是在这种极度令人遗憾的现状下。

　　我亲爱的法国朋友们，我们热烈欢迎你们所有人的到来，甚至那些想“在北京制造混乱”（一个欧洲议会议员的言论）的人。我们将会帮助他们找到一个好的保险公司，为他们提供一种包括所有民事责任的保险。

　　让我们北京见吧，亲爱的朋友们！

　　谢谢，非常感谢！

New Chinese Pop Song: Don't be too CNN

2008-04-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

Congrats to CNN, A new Chinese song for you:

Chinese to boycott products of CNN's advertisers

2008-04-11T17:00:00.000-07:00

Chinese to boycott products of CNN's advertisers

Waking up in the morning, CNN's advertisers might feel inscrutable that their products have already been on Chinese people's boycott lists.

Stunned and shocked by a racist and hatred remark on the Chinese people by CNN's commentator Jack Cafferty in "the Situation Room" aired on April 9th, the Chinese are fighting back by boycotting products of CNN's advertisers—those who are airing advertisements during Cafferty's show time.

Cafferty charged the Chinese people with a highly despicable assault by saying, "They (Chinese) are basically the same bunch goons and thugs they have been in the past fifty years." (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0804/09/sitroom.03.html)

The new campaign against CNN is just an escalated version of the "tit for tat" campaign in response to Cafferty's previous insult and CNN's recent coverage on the Olympic relay in Paris, London and San Francisco, which is overwhelmingly condemned by the Chinese community as ungrounded and defamatory.

The appeal, circulated on the internet and bulletin boards, indicates that a strong patriotic reaction among the Chinese people has been ignited. This time around, CNN is the target.

The more advertising bucks are poured here on CNN, the worse marketing will be expected there in China: The counter productive results the advertisers are afraid of. In recent years, most of the Fortune 500 companies have made targeted advertisement campaigns in China, a country with more than 1.3 billion potential customers.

The boycott statement urged CNN’s advertisers to understand Chinese people’s feelings against Cafferty’s comments while it did mention that the campaign doesn’t target any companies who are sponsoring other CNN programs, “at this point we Chinese consider it (Cafferty’s comments) unacceptable for advertisers to air their ads on Cafferty's show time”.

Till now, no apology has been heard from Mr. Jack Cafferty. CNN has neither made any clear
statements nor taken any actions since. Many have wondered how the media will handle the new controversy exactly a year after Don Imus was fired due to his racist comments on the Rutgers female basketball team.

Earlier this week, Coca Cola withdrew one of its advertisements in Germany that stirred the ire of many Chinese people who criticized the intention of pro-Tibet-Independence and urged the public to boycott the brand.

The poster - spotted in a German railway station - shows Buddhist monks on a rollercoaster with the slogan: "Make it real".

A spokesperson from Coca Cola stated on April 9th, " This was certainly not our intention ... The old image was being used in the window of a shop in Bremen and has since been taken down ..."

Source of the post: http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/SanFrancisco/31329637.html.

How CNN is Reporting: Anything is Possible

2008-04-04T05:51:00.000-07:00

This is how CNN is reporting events in this world. One suggestion to other media: Don't be too CNN. CNN is an adjective in Chinese now.

Xizang (Tibet) Was not A Part of China Before 1950s? Shut up!

2008-03-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

Western media oftern say that Xizang was not a part of China before Chinese Communists liberated the brutal serf society ( How brutal it was? come here. )and kicked out the serf owner Dalai Lama.

Here are some maps that were printed by other countries before Chinese Communists took the power in China. China was weak then and could not force US, Germany, and India to print out those maps, right?

Keep this in mind: Xizang was China's Xizang, is China's Xizang and will be China's Xizang forever!

This map was printed in India. It shows the Sino-India border between 1700-1792 as stated on the map. Xizang was a part of Chinese Empire. This map is from The Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd, 1923. You can find it here.

This is a map printed by Germany in 1891. It reflects China's territory before 1891. Germans, open your eyes, and then tell me: wasn't Xizang not in China back then? The same map can be found here. It was published by Gotha:Julius Perthes in 1891.

This is a map published before 1900. That's definitely not a map printed by China. Was Xizang in China? It was from Americanized Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.1, Chicago 1892. You can find it here.

A map published in US in 1900. Xizang isn't a part of China?
Thanks the reader who provided this map in his comment.

This is a world map printed by US in 1942. That's before Chinese Communists took power in China. Didn't Xizang belong to China?

Who Lie about Xizang (Tibet) Violence and How!

2008-03-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Xizang terrorists raided Lasha (Lhasa), they killed more than 10 innocent people and destroyed others' properties. But western media called such a terror a "peaceful" protest. Ridiculous, isn't it?

Many western madia simply say: People died in the protest. This implicitly tells their audience or readers that Chinese government killed protests. Do they dare mention who died? who attacked whom? and who killed whom? Amazing, isn't it?

Other than that, they distorted the facts by using pictures from violence in other countries and commented as what happened in China.

The terror event caused a lot life and property lose for China. But China gained alot.

First of all, Chinese are united now. That's the biggest gain we had in this individualism era. China are still China, we are united before any crisis and enemies. You can see Chinese comments anywhere. Most of them are supporting government. Some are even organizing protesting in Canada and maybe some European countries. This is a very impressive progress.

Secondly, western media's real face is exposed to Chinese and other readers. This is very important for China. Most of us now know western media are simply liar about China. There is no such a media freedom at all. They torture the truth and mislead readers. On the contrary, Chinese media are more reliable knowledge resources. Naive Chinese will not dance with the western propaganda machines any more. Recalling 1989 event when I was a college participant in so-called student movement, Chinese students trusted only western lies. But now, things changed. Chinese students have a clear picture of western propaganda machinese and will think independently. China will be more united and advance without disturbing from outside.

I do have complains to our government. It shows too much mercies to the terrorists. Criminals must be punished on the scene no matter who they are, which religion they believe. People's lives are equal, people's properties are precious. Murders must be killed. That's the eternal law that our Chinese have abided for 5000 years.

Now, I can show who lie about Xizang (Tibet) violence and how they did. Enjoy the eye-opening pictures for you. You are welcome to copy this images and paste to anywhere.

You can click the image to get big ones.

Germany N-TV channel: The right side are real Chinese policemen. The left side actually happened in Nepal.

USA Washington Post: It used the Nepal police to show what happened in China.

Germany Bild-Zeitung: It used picture from Nepal again. But it says it happened in China.

Another lie from Germany Bild-Zeitung: It used picture from Nepal again. But it says it happened in China.

Ok, this is about notorious USA CNN, a famous liar with most advanced techonology in this world. Apparently it is more cunning than others. The left side picture was used by CNN. It is a real picture from Lasha, BUT, it was deliberately cut off from a larger one (Shown on the right side). The part CNN used dropped a hint to its readers that a "peaceful protest" was crushed by Chinese police. Actually, the original picture shows that rioters were attacking police. Interesting, isn't it? Those stupid Germany media and Washington Post should learn some from CNN. CNN is the No. 1experienced liar the leading propagator on this planet. CNN stands for "Cheating News Network".

This is the lie from Germany RTL TV channel. It used the picture from Nepal again. But it says that's from China.

Here is the video from Germany Spiegel. The video actually was taken from Nepal again. That's brave nepal police were taking appropriate and necessary action aginst those terrorists. But Spiegel says that's China.

This is the lie from BBC. Where is the heavey military presence? Ambulance is the heavey military or the med? A classical shitting from BBC that is owned by UK government.

This is Berliner Morgenpost, Germany again. That's a Chinese who was rescued by police. But the German liar say that's a protester who was arrested by police. Big ass!

From Gwermany N-TV channel. Use the video from Nepal, but the TV lied to its audiences, said it happened in China.

From Germany N24 TV channel. Same as above.

Oh, yeah, That's Fox news in US. Apparantly that happened in India. Brave Indian police was crushing terrorists. Fox is really a cunning animal.

These are screenshots of Youtube. A self-claimed free-sharing and free media. But many Chinese are complaining the deleting of their uploaded videos that tells the truth in Xizang. Youtube also manipulates counters of the videos posted by Chinese so that these videos would not be listed among the most viewed ones. Here is the screenshot. You can find the number of comments is even greater than than the number of the views. After a while, the number of comments increased by almost 1000, while the number did not change. Funny, right?

There are some other reports from Germany. But I don't have picture so far. Hope some one can provide. Thanks in advance.
1. Germany SAT1 TV channel: The picture showed that Chinese police escorted three Japanese visitors to get out of rioters. The picture came from China's CCTV. But SAT1 explained it as arrested rioters.
2. Germany ARD TV channel. It saied more than 100 protesters were killed, and then mentioned that Chinese government's number was 13 people. They simply don't say those 13 were killed by rioters.

So many lies from Germany. That maybe not strange for this world if you know the history of WWII. Mr. Adolf Hitler and Mr. Paul Joseph Goebbels were leaders elected by Germans. But that's the past glory of Germany liars. Now, it seems German should learn from US in propagating. The student scores much higher than its teacher now. German obviously leads in lie by numbers, but CNN alone beats them all in quality and innovation. Hurry up, Germany!

Dalai Lama: A friend of Nazi and Shoko Asahara

2008-03-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

This is interesting for most of readers. It reveals Dalai's real face.

http://www.newspiritualbible.com/index2

More from Lhasa

2008-03-16T16:45:00.000-07:00

Harder to get photos today as there is a very heavy police/army presence just outside our hotel.

Before I continue with some updates from today and videos from yesterday, I want to make one thing clear because all of the major news outlets are ignoring a very important fact. Yes, the Chinese government bears a huge amount of blame for this situation. But the protests yesterday were NOT peaceful. The original protests from the past few days may have been, but all of the eyewitnesses in this room agree the protesters yesterday went from attacking Chinese police to attacking innocent people very, very quickly. They appeared to target Muslim and Han Chinese individuals and businesses first but many Tibetans were also caught in the crossfire.

This video is an excellent example:
http://rapidshare.de/files/38832674/MVI_0483.AVI.html

Rapidshare is a bit tricky to use. What you have to do after clicking the link is scroll to the very bottom and press the Free button on the bottom right. Then you have to wait a certain amount of time (there will be a countdown mid-page) and then a password will appear - enter the password in the box and then you can download the video.

This motorcyclist, who I assume the protesters identified as Han Chinese, was simply riding up Beijing Street when the video took place. He was not army, not police, not doing anything other than riding his motorcycle.

The above message was copied from http://kadfly.blogspot.com/2008/03/more-from-lhasa.html since I could not create a link.

Tibet WAS, IS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China

2008-03-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

Time For The West to Practise What it Preaches

2008-02-29T12:21:00.000-08:00

By Abdoulaye Wade

When it comes to China and Africa, the European Union and the US want to have their cake and eat it. In an echo of its past colonial rivalries, European leaders and donor organisations have expressed concerns that African nations are throwing their doors open too wide to Chinese investors and to exploitation by their Asian partners.

But if opening up more free markets is a goal that the west prizes – and extols as a path to progress – why is Europe fretting about China’s growing economic role in Africa? The expansion of free markets has indeed been a boon to Africa. But as I tell my friends in the west, China is doing a much better job than western capitalists of responding to market demands in Africa.

The battle for influence in the world between the west and China is not Africa’s problem. Our continent is in a hurry to build infrastructure, ensure affordable energy and educate our people. In many African nations, African leaders are striving to reinforce robust economic growth in a sustainable manner and reduce “brain-drain” incentives that have led to an exodus of well-educated Africans to Europe.

China’s approach to our needs is simply better adapted than the slow and sometimes patronising post-colonial approach of European investors, donor organisations and non-governmental organisations. In fact, the Chinese model for stimulating rapid economic development has much to teach Africa.

With direct aid, credit lines and reasonable contracts, China has helped African nations build infrastructure projects in record time – bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, dams, legislative buildings, stadiums and airports. In many African nations, including Senegal, improvements in infrastructure have played important roles in stimulating economic growth.

These are improvements, moreover, that stay in Africa and raise the standards of living for millions of Africans, not just an elite few. In Senegal, a Chinese company cannot be awarded an infrastructure-related contract unless it has partnered with a Senegalese company. In practice, Chinese companies are not only investing in Senegal but transferring technology, training, and know-how to Senegal at the same time.

It is a telling sign of the post-colonial mindset that some donor organisations in the west dismiss the trade agreements between Chinese banks and African states that produce these vital improvements – as though Africa was naïve enough to just offload its precious natural resources at bargain prices to obtain a commitment for another stadium or state house.

In the past, the political power-play between Taiwan and China often spurred Asian investment on the African continent. Today, however, economic relations are based more on mutual need – and the economic reality that the EU and the US cannot compete with China. A number of big projects in Senegal had initially been funded by the Taiwanese, but in 2005, Senegal abandoned the politicisation of development and opted for decisions based on a free market.

I have found that a contract that would take five years to discuss, negotiate and sign with the World Bank takes three months when we have dealt with Chinese authorities. I am a firm believer in good governance and the rule of law. But when bureaucracy and senseless red tape impede our ability to act – and when poverty persists while international functionaries drag their feet – African leaders have an obligation to opt for swifter solutions. I achieved more in my one hour meeting with President Hu Jintao in an executive suite at my hotel in Berlin during the recent G8 meeting in Heiligendamm than I did during the entire, orchestrated meeting of world leaders at the summit – where African leaders were told little more than that G8 nations would respect existing commitments.

At the same time that China has been especially nimble, the prices and quality of goods coming from Asia give African governments no choice other than to buy Chinese, Indian and Malaysian goods. For the price of one European vehicle, a Senegalese can purchase two Chinese cars. The proof is in the parking lot at the presidential palace in Dakar. Low-cost Chinese Chery and Great Wall models are giving Senegal’s middle and working classes access to a new car, a sign of our emerging consumer class. We are even using these affordable Chinese cars in a pilot project to reinsert unemployed women into the workforce by creating a fleet of taxis called Sister Taxis. When products are affordable, innovative programmes become realistic.

China, which has fought its own battles to modernise, has a much greater sense of the personal urgency of development in Africa than many western nations. Last year, the Chinese Eximbank pledged $20bn in development funds for African infrastructure and trade financing over the next three years, funds that outstripped all western donor pledges combined. News of the Exim commitment caused a fuss in some quarters of Europe. But western complaints about China’s slow pace in adopting democratic reform cannot obscure the fact that the Chinese are more competitive, less bureaucratic and more adept at business in Africa than their critics.

Today I find myself at the heart of an economic struggle with the EU. If Europe does not want to provide funding for African infrastructure – it pledged $15bn under the Cotonou Agreement eight years ago – the Chinese are ready to take up the task, more rapidly and at less cost. Not just Africa but the west itself has much to learn from China. It is time for the west to practice what it preaches about the value of market incentives.

Abdoulaye Wade is President of Senegal

Source.

Economic and Social Development of China in 2007

2008-02-29T12:17:00.000-08:00

By National Bureau of Statistics of China

February 28, 2008

Source: http://www.stats.gov.cn

I. General Outlook

In 2007, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the year was 24,661.9 billion yuan, up by 11.4 percent over the previous year. Analyzed by different industries, the value added of the primary industry was 2,891.0 billion yuan, up by 3.7 percent, that of the secondary industry was 12,138.1 billion yuan, up by 13.4 percent and the tertiary industry was 9,632.8 billion yuan, up by 11.4 percent. The value added of the primary industry accounted for 11.7 percent of the GDP, maintaining the same level of the pervious year, that of the secondary industry accounted for 49.2 percent, up by 0.3 percentage point, and that of the tertiary industry accounted for 39.1 percent, down by 0.3 percentage point. Quarterly data showed that the GDP growth in the first quarter of the year was 11.1 percent; second quarter 11.9 percent, third quarter 11.5 percent and 11.2 percent growth for the fourth quarter.

Figure 1: Gross Domestic Product and its Growth, 2003-2007

The general level of consumer prices in China was up by 4.8 percent over the previous year. Of this total, the prices for food went up by 12.3 percent. The retail prices for commodities were up by 3.8 percent. The prices for investment in fixed assets were up by 3.9 percent. The producer prices for manufactured goods increased by 3.1 percent, of which, the prices for means of production increased by 3.2 percent, and for means of subsistence grew by 2.8 percent. The purchasing prices for raw materials, fuels and power went up by 4.4 percent. The producer prices for farm products were up by 18.5 percent. The sales prices for housing in 70 large and medium-sized cities were up by 7.6 percent, of which, that for new residential buildings went up by 8.2 percent, for second hand housing grew by 7.4 percent, and the prices for rental and leasing were up by 2.6 percent.

Figure 2: Changes in Consumer Prices, 2003-2007

At the end of 2007, the total of employed people in China numbered 769.90 million, 5.90 million more than that of 2006. Of this total, 293.50 million were employed in urban areas, a net increase of 10.40 million, a newly increase of 12.04 million. The urban unemployment rate through unemployment registration was 4.0 percent at the end of 2007, a drop of 0.1 percentage point over that of 2006.

At the end of 2007, China’s foreign exchange reserves reached 1,528.2 billion US dollars, an increase of 461.9 billion US dollars as compared with that at the end of the pervious year. At the end of the year, the exchange rate was 7.3046 RMB to 1 USD, an appreciation by 6.9 percent over that at the end of 2006.

Figure 3: Year-end Foreign Exchange Reserves, 2003-2007

The taxes collected in the whole year reached 4,944.9 billion yuan (excluding tariffs, farm land taxes and deed taxes), up by 31.4 percent or an increase of 1,181.3 billion yuan over 2006.

Figure 4: Tax Revenue and its Growth, 2003-2007

II. Agriculture

In 2007, the sown area of grain was 105.53 million hectares, an increase of 700 thousand hectares as compared with that in the previous year; the sown area of cotton was 5.59 million hectares, an increase of 70 thousand hectares; the sown area of oil-bearing crops was 10.94 million hectares, a decline of 600 thousand hectares; the sown area of sugar crops was 1.67 million hectares, an increase of 100 thousand hectares.

The total output of grain in 2007 was 501.50 million tons, an increase of 3.50 million tons or up by 0.7 percent over the previous year. Of this total, the output of summer crops was 115.34 million tons, up by 1.3 percent, and that of the early rice was 31.96 million tons, up by 0.3 percent. The output of autumn grain was 354.20 million tons, an increase of 0.6 percent.

Figure 5: Output of Grain and its Growth, 2003-2007

In 2007, the output of cotton was 7.60 million tons, a growth of 1.3 percent over the previous year, that of oil-bearing crops was 24.61 million tons, down by 4.2 percent and that of sugar crops was 111.10 million tons, an increase of 11.4 percent, that of tobacco was 2.39 million tons, down by 3.9 percent, and that of tea was 1.14 million tons, up by 10.9 percent.

The total output of meat for the year reached 68.00 million tons, down by 3.5 percent. Of this total, the output of pork was down by 9.2 percent, and that of beef and mutton went up by 6.1 percent and 5.8 percent respectively. The total output of aquatic products was 47.37 million tons, up by 3.3 percent. The total production of timber for the year 2007 reached 69.74 million cubic meters, an increase of 5.5 percent.

Over 1.07 million hectares of farmland was increased with effective irrigation systems and another additional 1.36 million hectares of farmland was guaranteed by water-saving irrigation systems.

III. Industry and Construction

In 2007, the total value added of the industrial sector was 10,736.7 billion yuan, up by 13.5 percent over the previous year. The value added of industrial enterprises above the designated size was up by 18.5 percent. of this total, that of the state-owned and state-holding enterprises grew by 13.8 percent, that of the collective enterprises went up by 11.5 percent, that of the share-holding enterprises increased by 20.6 percent, that of the enterprises by foreign investors and investors from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan soared by 17.5 percent and 26.7 percent growth for private enterprises. Analyzed by light and heavy industries, the growth of the light industry was 16.3 percent and that of the heavy industry was 19.6 percent.

Figure 6: Industrial Value Added and its Growth, 2003-2007

In 2007, of the industrial enterprises above designated size, the growth of value added for the mining and washing of coal industry was18.1 percent over the previous year, for the extraction of petroleum and natural gas was 3.9 percent, for textile industry 16.2 percent, for processing of food from agricultural product 16.9 percent, for manufacture of general machinery 24.2 percent, for manufacture of transport equipment 26.2 percent, for manufacture of communication equipment, computers and other electronic equipment 18.0 percent and for manufacture of electrical machinery and equipment 21.5 percent. the growth of the value added for the major six high energy consuming industries were 18.9 percent, of which, that of the manufacture of non-metallic mineral products was 24.7 percent, smelting and pressing of ferrous metals 21.4 percent, manufacture of raw chemical materials and chemical products 21.0 percent, smelting and pressing of non-ferrous metals 17.8 percent, production and supply of electric power and heat power 13.8 percent and 13.4 percent for processing of petroleum, coking, processing of nuclear fuel. The value added growth for the high-tech industry was 17.8 percent over the previous year.

The profits made by the industrial enterprises above the designated size in the first 11 months of 2007 were 2,295.1 billion yuan, an increase of 36.7 percent over the same period of last year.

In 2007, the value added of construction enterprises in China was 1,401.4 billion yuan, up by 12.6 percent over the previous year. The profits made by construction enterprises qualified for general contracts and specialized contracts reached 147.0 billion yuan, up by 23.2 percent, with their paid taxes of 166.1 billion yuan, up by 18.5 percent.

IV. Investment in Fixed Assets

The completed investment in fixed assets of the country in 2007 was 13,723.9 billion yuan, up by 24.8 percent over the previous year. of the total investment, that in urban areas was 11,741.4 billon yuan, up by 25.8 percent; and that in rural areas reached 1,982.5 billion yuan, up by 19.2 percent. An analysis by regions showed that the investment in east areas was 7,231.4 billion yuan, up by 19.9 percent over the previous year, in central areas was 3,428.3 billion yuan, a growth of 33.3 percent, and in western areas 2,819.4 billion yuan, a growth of 28.2 percent.

Figure 7: Investment in Fixed Assets and its Growth, 2003-2007

In the urban areas, the investment in the primary industry was 146.6 billion yuan, up by 31.1 percent; that in the secondary industry was 5,102.0 billion yuan, up by 29.0 percent; and that in the tertiary industry was 6,492.8 billion yuan, up by 23.2 percent.

Table 4: Fixed Assets Investment in Urban Areas and its Growth by Sector in 2007

In 2007, the investment in real estate development was 2,528.0 billion yuan, up by 30.2 percent. Of this total, the investment in commercial residential buildings reached 1,801.0 billion yuan, an increase of 32.1 percent. The completed floor space of commercial buildings reached 582.36 million square meters, up by 4.3 percent. The total sales of commercial buildings reached 761.93million square meters, up by 23.2 percent, of which, that of the commercial residential building were 691.04 million square meters, up by 24.7 percent.

V. Domestic Trade

In 2007, the total retail sales of consumer goods reached 8,921.0 billion yuan, up by 16.8 percent over the previous year. An analysis on different areas showed that the retail sales of consumer goods in cities reached 6,041.1 billion yuan, up by 17.2 percent and the retail sales of consumer goods at and below county level was 2,879.9 billion yuan, up by 15.8 percent. Analyzed by different sectors, the sales of the wholesales and retail trade reached 7,504.0 billion yuan, up 16.7 percent; the sales of the lodging and catering industry was 1,235.2 billion yuan, up 19.4 percent, and the sales of the other industries was 181.8 billion yuan, up 4.5 percent.

Of the total retail sales by wholesale and retail enterprises above designated size, the sales of grain and oil was up by 38.3 percent, meat and eggs up by 40.9 percent, clothing up by 28.7 percent, motor vehicles up by 36.9 percent, petroleum and related products up by 20.5 percent, daily necessities up by 26.5 percent, cultural and office goods up by 22.6 percent, telecommunication equipment up by 8.8 percent, electric and electronic appliances for household use and audio-video equipment up by 23.4 percent, building and decoration materials up by 43.6 percent, furniture up 43.2 percent, cosmetics up by 26.3 percent, gold, silver and jewelry up by 41.7 percent and traditional Chinese drugs and western drugs up by 25.1 percent.

Figure 8: Total Retail Sales of Consumer Goods and its Growth, 2003-2007

VI. Foreign Economic Relations

The total value of imports and exports in 2007 reached 2,173.8 billion US dollars, up 23.5 percent over the previous year. Of this total, the value of exports was 1,218.0 billion US dollars, up 25.7 percent, and the value of imports was 955.8 billion US dollars, up 20.8 percent. China had a trade surplus of 262.2 billion US dollars, an increase of 84.7 billion US dollars over the previous year.

Figure 9: Imports and Exports and the Growth Rates, 2003-2007

The year 2007 witnessed the establishment of 37,871 enterprises with foreign direct investment in non-financial sectors, down by 8.7 percent; and the foreign capital actually utilized was 74.8 billion US dollars, up by 13.6 percent. Of the total foreign direct investment actually utilized, the share of investment in manufacturing was 54.7 percent over the pervious year, the real estate 22.9 percent, leasing and business service 5.4 percent, wholesales and retail trade 3.6 percent and transportation, storage and post service 2.7 percent.

In 2007, the overseas direct investment (non-financial sectors) by Chinese investors was 18.7 billion US dollars, up by 6.2 percent over the previous year.

In 2007, the accomplished business revenue through contracted overseas engineering projects was 40.6 billion US dollars, up by 35.3 percent, and the business revenue through overseas labor contracts was 6.8 billion US dollars, up by 26.0 percent over the previous year.

VII. Transportation, Post, Telecommunications and Tourism

The value added of the transportation, storage, post and telecommunication sectors reached 1,364.9 billion yuan in 2007, up 9.7 percent over the previous year.

The volume of freight handled by ports above the designated size throughout the year totaled 5.21 billion tons, up 13.4 percent over the previous year, of which freight for foreign trade was 1.78 billion tons, up 12.6 percent. Container shipping handled 111.79 million standard containers, up by 21.5 percent.

The total number of motor vehicles for civilian use reached 56.97 million (including 14.68 million tri-wheel motor vehicles and low-speed trucks) by the end of 2007, up 14.3 percent, of which private-owned vehicles numbered 35.34 million, up 20.8 percent. The total number of cars for civilian use stood at 19.58 million, up by 26.7 percent, of which private-owned cars numbered 15.22 million, up by 32.5 percent.

The turnover of post and telecommunication services totaled 1,936.1 billion yuan, up 26.4 percent over the previous year. Of this total, post services accounted for 81.5 billion yuan, up 11.8 percent, and telecommunication services 1,854.5 billion yuan, up 27.1 percent. By the end of 2007, with 8.36 million newly installed lines of office switchboards, the total capacity reached 510 million lines. The year also saw 365.45 million fixed telephone subscribers. This included 248.59 million urban subscribers and 116.86 million rural subscribers. Mobile phone users numbered 547.29 million by the end of 2007, with 86.23 million new subscribers in the year. In total, the number of fixed and mobile phone users reached 912.73 million, an increase of 83.89 million as compared with at the end of 2006. Phone coverage is 69 sets per 100 persons. The number of Internet users was 210 million and wide-band users reached 163 million.

Figure 10: Number of Phone Subscribers, 2003 - 2007

In 2007, the number of inbound visitors to China totaled 131.87 million, a year-on-year rise of 5.5 percent. Of this total, 26.11 million were foreigners, up 17.6 percent; and 105.76 million were Chinese compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, up 2.9 percent. Of all the inbound tourists, overnight visitors counted 54.72 million, up 9.6 percent. Foreign exchange earnings from international tourism topped 41.9 billion US dollars, up 23.5 percent. The number of China’s outbound visitors totaled 40.95 million, up 18.6 percent. Of this total, 34.92 million were on private visits, a year-on-year rise of 21.3 percent, or 85.3 percent of all outgoing visitors. The year 2007 saw 1.61 billion domestic tourists, up 15.5 percent. The revenue from domestic tourism totaled 777.1 billion yuan, up 24.7 percent.

VIII. Banking, Securities and Insurance
By the end of 2007, money supply of broad sense (M2) was 40.3 trillion yuan, reflecting a year-on-year increase of 16.7 percent. Money supply of narrow sense (M1) was 15.3 trillion yuan, up 21.1 percent. Cash in circulation (M0) was 3.0 trillion yuan, up 12.2 percent. Savings deposit in Renminbi and foreign currencies in all items of financial institutions totaled 40.1 trillion yuan at the end of 2007, up 15.2 percent. Loans in Renminbi and foreign currencies in all items of financial institutions reached 27.8 trillion yuan, up 16.4 percent.

Figure 11: Urban and Rural Households’ Savings Deposit in RMB and its Growth, 2003 - 2007

Loans in Renminbi from rural financial cooperation institutions (i.e. rural credit cooperatives, rural cooperation banks, and rural commercial banks) totaled 3.1 trillion yuan by the end of 2007, an increase of 508.5 billion yuan as compared with the beginning of 2007. The loans in Renminbi for consumption use from all financial institutions totaled 3.3 trillion yuan, an increase of 869.9 billion yuan. Of all consumption loans, those for individual housing totaled 2.7 trillion yuan, an increase of 714.7 billion yuan.

Funds raised in 2007 by enterprises through issuing stocks and share rights on stock market amounted to 843.2 billion yuan, an increase of 283.8 billion yuan over the previous year. Of this total, 283 companies issued A-shares (including newly issued and convertible loan stocks) with 7 companies issued A-share rights, receiving 772.8 billion yuan worth of capital altogether, an increase of 526.4 billion yuan over 2006. The issue of 14 H-shares raised another 70.4 billion yuan worth of capital, a decrease of 242.7 billion yuan. The number of listed companies (with A- or B-shares) on China’s stock market rose from 1,434 at the end of 2006 to 1,550 at the end of 2007, representing 32,714.1 billion yuan worth of market value, a growth of 265.9 percent over the previous year.

The total corporate bonds issued throughout the year reached 1,708.4 billion yuan, an increase of 352.0 billion yuan over 2006. Of this total, the financial bonds were 1,191.3 billion yuan, a growth of 230.8 billion yuan; the enterprise (corporate) bonds were 182.1 billion yuan, an increase of 80.6 billion yuan; and the short-term financing funds were 334.9 billion yuan, an increase of 40.6 billion yuan.

The premium received by the insurance companies totaled 703.6 billion yuan in 2007, up 25.0 percent over the previous year. Of this total, life insurance premium amounted to 446.4 billion yuan, health and casualty insurance premium 57.4 billion yuan, and property insurance premium 199.8 billion yuan. Insurance companies paid an indemnity worth of 226.5 billion yuan, of which, life insurance indemnity was 106.4 billion yuan, health and casualty insurance indemnity 18.0 billion yuan, and property insurance indemnity 102.1 billion yuan.

IX. Education, Science and Technology

In 2007, the post-graduate education enrollment was 1.2 million students with 420 thousand new students and 310 thousand graduates. The general tertiary education enrollment was 18.85 million students with 5.66 million new students and 4.48 million graduates. Vocational secondary schools of various types had 20 million enrolled students, including 8 million new entrants, and 5.3 million graduates. Senior secondary schools had 25.22 million enrolled students, including 8.4 million new entrants, and 7.88 million graduates. Students enrolled in junior secondary schools totaled 57.36 million, including 18.69 million new entrants, and 19.64 million graduates. The country had a primary education enrollment of 105.64 million students, including 17.36 million new entrants, and 18.7 million graduates. There were 410 thousand students enrolled in special education schools, with 60 thousand new entrants. Kindergartens accommodated 23.49 million children.

Figure 12: New Entrants into Education, 2003 - 2007

The amount of expenditures on research and development activities (R&D) was worth 366.4 billion yuan in 2007, up 22.0 percent over 2006, accounting for 1.49 percent of GDP. Of this total, 18 billion yuan was appropriated for fundamental research programs. A total number of 1,540 projects under the National Key Technology Research and Development Program and 2,541 projects under the Hi-tech Research and Development Program (the 863 Program) were implemented. The year 2007 saw the establishment of 9 new national engineering research centers and 6 national engineering laboratories. the number of state validated enterprise technical centers reached 499 by the end of the year. The technical centers at the provincial level numbered 4,023. Some 694 thousand patent applications were accepted from home and abroad, of which 587 thousand were domestic applications, accounting for 84.5 percent of the total. A total number of 245 thousand patent applications for new inventions were accepted, of which 153 thousand were from domestic applicants or 62.4 percent of the total. A total of 352 thousand patents were authorized in 2007, of which 302 thousand were domestic patents, accounting for 85.7 percent of the total. A total of 68 thousand patents for new inventions were authorized, of which 32 thousand were domestic ones, accounting for 47.0 percent. A total of 210 thousand technology transfer contracts were signed, representing 220 billion yuan in value, up 21.0 percent over the previous year. The year 2007 saw 10 times of successful launch of satellites and Chang’e-1 circumlunar exploration satellite was launched successfully.

By the end of 2007, there were altogether 24,700 laboratories for product inspection, including 356 national inspection centers. There were 184 organizations for product certification and management system certification, which accumulatively certified products in 70 thousand enterprises. A total of 3,720 authorized measurement institutions enforced compulsory inspection on 42.18 million measurement instruments in the year. A total of 1,411 national standards were developed or revised in the year, including 747 new standards. Through out the year, a total of 3,350 weather forewarning signals were released and alarm signals were 690 times. There were 1,314 seismological monitor stations and 31 seismological remote monitor network stations. The numbers of oceanic observation stations were 66 and oceanic monitor spots reached 9,200. Mapping departments published 1,946 maps and 417 mapping books.

X. Culture, Public Health and Sports

At the end of 2007, there were 2,856 art-performing groups, 2,921 culture centers, 2,791 public libraries, 1,634 museums, 263 radio broadcasting stations, 287 television stations, 1,993 radio broadcasting and television stations and 44 educational television stations throughout China. Subscribers to cable television programs numbered 151.18 million. Subscribers to digital cable television programs were 26.16 million. Radio broadcasting and television broadcasting coverage rates were 95.4 percent and 96.6 percent respectively. The country produced 402 feature movies and 58 science, educational, documentary, cartoon and special movies. A total of 43.9 billion copies of newspapers and 2.9 billion copies of magazines were issued, and 6.6 billion copies of books published. by the end of the year, there were 3,952 archives in China and 67.87 million documents were made accessible to the public.

By the end of 2007, there were 315 thousand health institutions in China, including 60 thousand general hospitals and health centers, 3,007 maternal and child health-care institutions, 1,400 specialized health institutions, 3,540 epidemic disease prevention centers (stations) and 2,590 health monitoring institutions. There were 4.68 million health workers in China, including 2.04 million practicing doctors and assistant practicing doctors and 1.47 million registered nurses. General hospitals and health centers in China possessed 3.279 million beds. There were 24 thousand community health service centers. the number of rural health care centers was 39 thousand, possessing 675 thousand beds and employing 863 thousand health care workers. In 2007, 3.581 million people were infected by A or B class infectious diseases, with 12,954 reported deaths. the incidence of infectious disease was 272.4 per 100 thousand, with the death rate standing at 0.99 per 100 thousand.

In 2007, Chinese athletes won 123 world championships on 22 sports events. Eight athletes and 2 teams broke 10 world records on 10 occasions. the amateur sports activities were carried out vigorously.

XI. Population, Living Conditions and Social Security

At the end of 2007, the total number of Chinese population reached 1,321.29 million, an increase of 6.81 million over that at the end of 2006. The year 2007 saw 15.94 million births, a crude birth rate of 12.10 per thousand, and 9.13 million deaths, or a crude death rate of 6.93 per thousand. The natural growth rate was 5.17 per thousand. the sex ratio at birth was 120.22.

In 2007, the annual per capita net income of rural households was 4,140 yuan, or a real increase of 9.5 percent over the previous year when the factors of price increase were deducted. The annual per capita disposable income of urban households was 13,786 yuan, or a real increase of 12.2 percent. The Engel coefficient (which refers to the proportion of expenditure on food to the total expenditure of households) was 43.1 percent for rural households and 36.3 percent for urban households. The population in absolute poverty in rural areas with annual per capita net income below 785 yuan numbered 14.79 million at the end of 2007, a decline of 6.69 million over the previous year. The low-income population in rural areas with annual per capita net income between 786 - 1067 yuan numbered 28.41 million, a decline of 7.09 million.

Figure 13: Per Capita Net Income of Rural Households and its Growth, 2003-2007

Figure 14: Per Capita Disposable Income of Urban Households and its Growth, 2003-2007

At the end of 2007, a total of 201.07 million people participated in basic pension program, a year-on-year increase of 13.41 million. Of this total, 151.56 million were staff and workers, and 49.51 million were retirees. A total of 220.51 million people participated in urban basic health insurance program, an increase of 63.19 million, of whom 179.83 million people participated in urban basic health insurance program for staff and workers, 40.68 million people participated in programs for residents. A total of 31.31 million people participated in urban health insurance programs were migrant workers coming from the rural areas, an increase of 7.64 million. Some 116.45 million people participated in unemployment insurance programs, an increase of 4.58 million. A total of 121.55 million people participated in work accident insurance, an increase of 18.87 million, of which 39.66 million were migrant workers coming from the rural areas, an increase of 14.29 million. A total of 77.55 million people participated in maternity insurance programs, an increase of 12.96 million. A total of 2,448 counties (cities, districts) conducted the new cooperative medical care system in rural areas, attracting 730 million farmers which represented a participation rate of 85.7 percent. The total expenditure of the new cooperative medical care system in rural areas reached 22 billion yuan, benefiting 260 million people. In 2007, the urban medical assistance helped 4.07 million people, up by 117.2 percent. The rural medical assistance helped 6.03 million people, up by 150.1 percent. A total of 23.06 million people were funded by the civil affairs department in the rural cooperative medical care system.

The number of people receiving unemployment insurance payment stood at 2.86 million. A total of 22.71 million urban residents received the government minimum living allowances, or 310 thousand more than the previous year. About 34.52 million rural residents received the government minimum living allowance, an increase of 18.59 million.

Social welfare institutions of various types provided 2.05 million beds by the end of 2007, accommodating 1.63 million inmates. There were 128 thousand community service facilities and 10,299 comprehensive community service centers were set up in urban areas. A total of 63.2 billion yuan worth of social welfare lottery tickets were sold, raising 21.7 billion yuan of social welfare funds. A total of 4.2 billion yuan were received from direct donations.

XII. Resources, Environment and Work Safety

A total of 188.3 thousand hectares of cultivated land was used for construction purpose in 2007. An area of 17.9 thousand hectares of cultivated land was destroyed by disasters, 25.4 thousand hectares of farmland was converted into land for ecological preservation. The structural adjustment to agriculture led to a reduction of 4.9 thousand hectares of cultivated land. Land reclamation and re-development programs added 195.8 thousand hectares of cultivated land. As a result, the year 2007 witnessed a net reduction of 40.7 thousand hectares of cultivated land.

The total stock of water resources in 2007 was 2,469.0 billion cubic meters, a year-on-year decline of 2.5 percent, or 1,873 cubic meters in per capita terms, down by 3.0 percent. The annual average precipitation was 608 millimeters, up by 1.9 percent. Large reservoirs in China stored 186.9 billion cubic meters of water at the end of 2007, 5.2 billion cubic meters more than that at the end of 2006. Total water consumption went down by 0.6 percent to reach 576.0 billion cubic meters, of which water consumption for living purposes rose by 1.6 percent, for industrial use up by 2.7 percent and for agricultural use down by 2.2 percent. Water consumption for every 10 thousand yuan worth of GDP produced was 253 cubic meters, a decline of 10.8 percent. Water consumption for every 10 thousand yuan worth of industrial value added was 139 cubic meters, down by 9.5 percent. Per capita water consumption was 437 cubic meters, down by 1.1 percent.

National land surveys and geological explorations discovered a total of 208 new mineral deposits in large or medium size, including 50 energy mineral deposits, 73 metallic mineral deposits, 82 non-metallic mineral deposits and 3 aqueous and gaseous deposits. Increased reserves were found for 77 minerals, including 1.21 billion tons of crude oil, 697.4 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 40.62 billion tons of coal.

A total of 5.20 million hectares of forest were planted, 3.71million hectares of forest were survived, of which 2.56 million were afforested by manpower. Some 2.68 million hectares were afforested through key afforestation projects, accounting for 72.2 percent of the total planted area of the year. About 2.27 billion trees were planted in 2007 by volunteers. By the end of 2007, there were 2,531 natural reserves including 303 national ones and covering a total area of 151.88 million hectares, or 15.0 percent of the total land area of China. A total of 39 thousand square kilometers of eroded land were put under comprehensive treatment programs, and 33 thousand square kilometers of land were closed for nurture and protection in areas suffering water and soil erosion.

Preliminary estimation indicated that the total energy consumption in 2007 amounted to 2.65 billion tons of standard coal equivalent, up 7.8 percent over 2006. The consumption of coal was 2.58 billion tons, up 7.9 percent; crude oil 340 million tons, up 6.3 percent; natural gas 67.3 billion cubic meters, up 19.9 percent; and electric power 3,263.2 billion kilowatt hours, up 14.1 percent. The consumption of major kinds of raw materials included 520 million tons of rolled steel, up 17.4 percent; 3.99 million tons of copper, up by 13.0 percent; 11.12 million tons of electrolytic aluminum, up by 27.6 percent; 10.48 million tons of ethylene, up by 11.4 percent; and 1.33 billion tons of cement, up 10.5 percent.

Figure 15: Total Energy Consumption and its Growth, 2003-2007

Monitoring of water quality on 408 sections of the 7 major water systems in China showed that 50.0 percent of the sections met the national quality standard of Grade III for surface water, 26.5 percent of the sections met the quality standard of Grade IV or V, and 23.5 percent were worse than Grade V. There was no significant change of the water quality in the 7 major water systems as compared with that in the previous year.

Monitoring of oceanic water quality at 296 offshore monitoring stations indicated that oceanic water met the national quality standard Grade I and II in 62.8 percent of the stations, down by 4.9 percentage points from the previous year; water quality at 11.8 percent of the stations met Grade III standard, up by 3.8 percentage points; and water of Grade IV or inferior quality was found at 25.4 percent of the stations, up by 1.1 percentage points. A total of 145 thousand square kilometers of oceanic waters did not meet the quality standard for clean oceanic water, a decrease of 4 thousand square kilometers. of this total, seriously polluted oceanic area occupied 29 thousand square kilometers. Seriously polluted oceanic area in Bohai Sea occupied 6 thousand square kilometers.

In the 557 cities covered by air quality monitoring program, 389 cities reached or topped air quality standard Grade II, accounting for 69.8 percent of all cities under the program; 152 cities attained Grade III, accounting for 27.3 percent; and air quality in 16 cities was inferior to Grade III, accounting for 2.9 percent. of the 342 cities subject to noise monitoring program, 6.1 percent enjoyed fairly good environment, 64.6 percent had good environment, 28.1 percent had light noise pollution, and 1.2 percent experienced medium noise pollution in downtown areas.

The average temperature in 2007 was 10.1℃, which was 0.2℃ higher than that in previous year. Typhoon hit China 8 times in 2007, 2 more compared with that in 2006.

At the end of 2007, the daily treatment capacity of city sewage reached 70.00 million cubic meters, up 10.0 percent over that in 2006. City sewage treatment rate was 59.0 percent, up 3.3 percentage points. The floor space with central heating systems amounted to 2.85 billion square meters, up 7.1 percent. Greenery coverage reached 36.0 percent of the urban area, up 1 percentage point.

In 2007, natural disasters caused 236.3 billion yuan worth of direct economic loss, down by 6.5 percent. Natural disasters hit 48.99 million hectares of crops, up 19.2 percent, of which 5.75 million hectares of crops was demolished, up 6.2 percent. 2007 witnessed 9,260 forest fires, up by 13.3 percent. There was no extra big forest fire. Floods and waterlog caused a direct economic loss of 82.6 billion yuan, up by 46.9 percent and left a death roll of 1,168, up by 54.9 percent. Drought caused a direct economic loss of 78.5 billion yuan, up by 10.9 percent. Oceanic disasters caused a direct economic loss of 8.84 billion yuan, down by 59.5 percent. The occurrence of red tides hit an accumulative area of 11,610 square kilometers, down by 41.5 percent. China registered 25 thousand geological disasters which left a death doll of 598 and made a total direct economic loss of 2.48 billion yuan. The country recorded 6 earthquakes with magnitude 5 and over, 3 of which caused disasters, causing a direct economic loss of 2.02 billion yuan.

The death toll due to work accidents amounted to 101,480 people, a year-on-year decrease of 10.1 percent. The death toll from work accidents every 100 million yuan worth of GDP was 0.413 people, a decline of 26.3 percent. Work accidents in industrial, mining and commercial enterprises caused 3.05 deaths out of every 100 thousand employees, down 8.4 percent. The death toll for producing one million tons of coal in coal mines was 1.485 persons, down 27.2 percent. The year 2007 witnessed 327 thousand traffic accidents, claiming 82 thousand lives, injuring 380 thousand people and causing a direct property loss of 1.2 billion yuan. The road traffic death toll per 10 thousand vehicles was 5.1 persons, a decrease of 1.1 persons.
Notes:

1. All figures in this Communiqué are preliminary statistics.
2. Statistics in this Communiqué do not include Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR and Taiwan Province.
3. Due to the rounding-off reasons, the subentries may not add up to the aggregate totals.
4. Gross domestic product (GDP) and value added as quoted in this Communiqué are calculated at current prices, whereas their growth rates are at comparable prices.
5. The base figures for calculating the output growth rate of major farm products are adjusted correspondently according to the results of the second national agricultural census. The output of fruits and vegetables are under checking, and will be published separately.
6. Six highly energy-consuming industries are: manufacture of raw chemical materials and chemical products, manufacture of non-metallic mineral products, smelting and pressing of ferrous metals, smelting and pressing of non-ferrous metals, oil processing, coking and nuclear fuel processing, and production and supply of electricity and heat.
7. Output and consumption of rolled steel include duplicated counting of rolled steel as intermediate inputs used for producing other types of rolled steel.
8. The national total of fixed assets investment is larger than the aggregate sum by adding up the subtotals of fixed assets investment in the eastern areas, central areas, and western areas due to the fact that some of the trans-regional investments are not covered by regional figures.
9. The investment in real estate includes the investment made in real estate development, construction of buildings for own use, property management, intermediary services and other real estate development.
10. The original premium income received by the insurance companies refers to the premium income from original insurance contracts confirmed by the insurance companies, same as the “premium received by the insurance companies” in previous Communiqués.
11. The number of people covered in urban basic health insurance programs for urban staff and workers include staff and workers and retirees insured. the urban basic health insurance programs for urban residents refer to urban non-employed residents who are not covered by the urban basic health insurance programs for staff and workers.
12. The consumption of water for producing 10 thousand yuan worth of GDP is calculated at 2005 constant prices. The turnover of post and telecommunication services is calculated at constant prices of 2000.
13. The consumption of energy for producing 10 thousand yuan worth of GDP, the total emission of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and the sulfur dioxide (SO2) of the whole country will be further certified by relevant departments and be published in near future.

Lenovo Thinkpad X300 vs Apple Mackbook Air

2008-02-29T10:25:00.001-08:00

You can click it to view a the bigger picture of this table.

The only thing I need to mention here is that the CPUs used by both machines are all Core 2 Duo SL7100 LV. Thinkpad X300's runs on lower clock at 1.2GHZ. The 800MHZ in the table is actually the front bus speed.

Beijing opens massive airport terminal

2008-02-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

Beijing's new international air terminal, which opened today in time for the Summer Olympics surge, attracts and embodies superlatives. It also embodies the new China, a country racing headlong into the future fueled by an economy on fire.

For many countries increasingly worried about how competitive and fast-moving China is, this $2.8-billion project provides one more reason to fret. China's authoritarian system can certainly move. At its peak, the construction site had 50,000 workers toiling around the clock.

"Most Western politicians wouldn't admit agreeing to that system, but they're very jealous," said Rory McGowan, Beijing-based director of global engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners, which worked on the project. The Chinese "can react to decisions four or five times faster than we can [in the West] because China runs the way it does." China has a long history of awing visitors with structures that evoke size and power, epitomized by the Forbidden City.

The terminal measures about 10.6 million square feet. By comparison, the Pentagon, often described as the largest office building in the world, is 6.5 million square feet. And the enormous terminal is astride a runway able to handle the new Airbus A380 superjumbo jets. It's got all manner of bells and whistles, including "barrier-free" facilities for the disabled, floor tracking to guide the blind, and multi-denominational prayer rooms in an officially atheist country. It also has baby-changing facilities galore and 26 smoking rooms with advanced filtering systems -- in short, a lot of stuff you probably won't see again during your stay in China.

The designers put a premium on air, light, greenery and distinct Chinese characteristics. The sloping roof is meant to evoke a dragon, with triangular skylights resembling scales. Feng shui principles were incorporated into the design, and the interior is decorated in colors that hold special meaning for Chinese.

"Feng shui has a scientific and a superstitious side," said Shao Weiping, principal architect with Beijing Architectural Design. "We used the scientific side."

Six airlines will start flying from Beijing's massive terminal today, and flag carrier Air China and others will move from the airport's two older terminals in March. Air China and United are the only airlines offering nonstop service from Beijing to LAX. United's flights will also move to the new terminal next month.

The new terminal will boost the airport's annual capacity by tens of millions of passengers to 82 million, a target planners originally expected to hit around 2015, but now believe could come years earlier. A second international airport is already under consideration.

Excerpted from LA Time.

Analysis: Demise of India's IC manufacturing dreams

2008-02-28T13:38:00.000-08:00

When India government and media are still loudly shouting about semiconductor industry, such as India gets $7 bn for Fab City, Industrial analysis found everything is just illusion. Here is a report from EETimes.

One word: India's voice is always louder than its action.

India's chip manufacturing dreams appear to be doomed as SemIndia's $3 billion-fab project is likely to die a premature death as will another fab planned by India Electronics Manufacturing Corp. (IEMC). In addition, Korean investor June Min's plan to set up India's first fab in Hyderabad has been abandoned in favor of making photovoltaic products.

India had made major strides in the last year, announcing a chip manufacturing policy. The incentive policy was intended to help launch state-of-the-art fabs in the country over the next few years.

But the high expectations here for a domestic chip industry have faded as financial realities reemerge. Both SemIndia's fab, which would use technology from Advanced Micro Devices, and IEMC's fab with partner Infineon Technologies, appear to be dead in the water.

Venture capital firm Sandalwood Partners, Wall Street fund Empire Capital Partners and contract electronics manufacturer Flextronics, which together have pumped more than $30 million into the SemIndia venture, are uncertain about SemIndia's fab strategy, according to sources close to the project.

"There are many uncertainties in the Indian context," said one industry source. "In particular, since the semiconductor industry is a very dynamic and cyclic—with periodic downturns and a highly intensive capital industry—it becomes imperative that any company involved in this area has to be able to manage its investments, capacity allocation, new factories and phasing out of the old technologies in a shorter timeframe.

"This is crucial to the survival and growth of the semi industry. It is not clear that it is yet possible to manage this dynamics in India," the industry source added.

Shifting gears
Despite the uncertainty, SemIndia's Systems unit is emerging as the company's flagship, and its manufacturing capability has bolstered the company's financial performance. Similarly, IEMC outlined revised plans focusing on the photovoltaic market where CEO Rajendra Singh is an expert.

The $25-billion conglomerate Reliance or other deep- pocketed suitors may also be considering a buyout of ailing chip makers like AMD, say industry observers.

Its investors have a simple strategy for SemIndia: From the start, grow SemIndia Systems into a profitable venture. It is the first Indian manufacturer to ship over 1 million ADSL2+ broadband modems in its first year of production. Annual revenues surpassed $25 million in 2007, and its run rate for 2008 is an estimated $80 million.

The Indian manufacturer has overtaken established companies such as D-Link, Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese companies that have long supplied Indian companies.

SemIndia Systems has also recorded substantial growth in less than two years, and investors are forecasting as much as 50-fold growth within the next three to four years if it sticks with back-end manufacturing rather than chip making.

"It is precisely because of this that SemIndia is attracting the attention of many funding institutions, and is likely to announce a substantial additional funding from a handful of U.S. VCs and Wall Street funds," a source said.

New plans
India's electronics market is expected to reach $363 billion by 2015, and domestic demand for semiconductors alone is forecast to reach $36 billion, according to market researcher Frost & Sullivan.

"Sometimes when you are too close to the project you are not able to see where you are going," said one investor. "That was precisely the case with the SemIndia project. Now, we have realized that we were wrong, and to straighten things out we are requesting for the company to change the business model."

IEMC executives have also shelved its fab plans. "We are not planning to set up a fab in India for the time being. We have other plans," said an IEMC executive who asked not to be named.

A key reason is soaring fab costs. The $3-billion investment which SemIndia envisaged in October 2005 now stands at $7 billion. And the question now is, why spend $7 billion when a company could buy an existing chipmaker for the same amount?

According to industry analyst Y. Shashidar, "India has to take smaller steps and move in a right direction. If Indian companies can buyout fabs, they should check out the technology and see whether their business plans could integrate" a fab.

Industry analysts also blame the Indian government's delayed and murky chip policy for the failure to launch a fab here. Policy makers were offering a special incentive package scheme to encourage fab investments, including a 25-percent subsidy on capital expenditures for manufacturing outside special economic zones and 20 percent inside these zones. "However, the form in which the government will provide this subsidy is unclear," financial advisor Deloitte concluded in an internal note on semiconductor investments in India.

Industry experts also wonder what an India chipmaker could offer the global market that Chinese manufacturers can't. With Intel Corp. planning a 65nm fab in China, most observers here agree with an IEMC executive who said India's "big fab story is truly dead."

Another report also found that India's semiconductor revenues fall short of forecast.

The revenues for semiconductors in India during 2006 have fallen short of the forecast of India Semiconductor Association (ISA) ô Frost & Sullivan study by 41 per cent.

The ISA-Frost & Sullivan semiconductor market report had forecast the revenues in the Indian total market to touch $3.8 billion and the total available market (TAM) revenues to touch $1.62 billion. However, the report update in 2007 estimated the actual revenues at $2.69 billion (total market revenues) and $1.26 billion (TAM).

The report update, released at the ISA Vision Summit 2008 on Monday, attributes the shortfall in revenues to the sharp decline in various semiconductors Average Selling Price (ASPs) in different end-user product categories.

Textile sector fails to gain from quota removal

2008-02-28T13:27:00.000-08:00

I bet many reader still remember India's tout about India would pass China in textile industry. But the fact hits back again. This following is the news from The Times of India. . More information can be found on that website.

The dismantling of the quota system failed to work wonders for textile and clothing (T&C) exports from India while neighbouring China marched ahead, despite restricitve quotas imposed by major importers like the US and EU.

Quota system was dismantled in 2005 and India was counted among key beneficiaries. However, the survey clearly shows that China beat India in major markets like the US and EU, leaving much to be desired.

"Though the growth in our T&C exports to the world accelerated sharply to 30% in 2005, it reverted back to the trend levels in 2006 with a disappointing 10.5%. China, in contrast, continued to raise its already high share of global T&C exports, with growth accelerating from 21% in 2005 to 25% in 2006, despite restrictive quotas by the US and EU," the survey said.

India's share in the global T&C exports grew by just 0.7% to 3.7% between 2004 and 2006 just when China managed to increase its share by a big 6.3% to 27.2%.

The worrying trend continued for India in 2007 as well, if one looks at the US market. In January-November 2007, US imports of T&C from the world grew by only 3.8%, affecting imports from India that grew by only 2% though China again managed a robust 20.5% growth.

What Makes a Miracle? Some myths about the rise of China and India

2008-02-25T17:23:00.000-08:00

By Pranab Bardhan

After more than a century of relative stagnation, the economies of India and China have been growing at remarkably high rates over the past 25 years. In 1820 the two countries contributed nearly half of the world’s income; by 1950, with the industrialized West having pulled away, their share had fallen to less than one-tenth. Today it is just less than one-fifth, and projections suggest that by 2025 it will rise to one-third. (In 2008 the World Bank is expected to issue revised numbers about cost of living in China and India, which may somewhat reduce these estimated income shares, both current and future).

The consequences of this expansion are extraordinary. The Chinese economy in particular has made the most headway against poverty in world history, with hundreds of millions of people moved out of the most extreme poverty within just a generation. (The environmental consequences are comparably remarkable, though perhaps proportionately disastrous).

What explains this strikingly rapid growth? The answer that continues to dominate public discussion in the United States runs along the following lines: decades of socialist controls and regulations stifled enterprise in India and China and led them to a dead end. A mix of market reforms and global integration finally unleashed their entrepreneurial energies. As these giants shook off their “socialist slumber,” they entered the “flattened” playing field of global capitalism. The result has been high economic growth in both countries and correspondingly large declines in poverty.

While India’s performance has been substantial, China’s has been truly dramatic. The particularly dramatic Chinese performance (like the earlier economic “miracles” in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore) suggests, in the dominant narrative, that authoritarianism may be better than democracy for development—at least in its early stages. Regional economic decentralization provided local autonomy and incentives, and, even without democracy, led to broad-based local development. But the narrative warns that global capitalism has brought rising inequality, more in China than in India. The idea is that this may portend serious trouble for Chinese political stability, as China does not have the capability of democratic India to let off the steam of inequality-induced discontent.

This story contains a few elements of truth and provides many comforts to our preconceptions. But through sheer repetition it has acquired an authority that does not withstand scrutiny.

Start with the claim that global integration and associated market reforms resulted in high growth, which in turn produced dramatic declines in extreme poverty. Applied to China, the timing simply does not fit. China has indeed made large strides in foreign trade and investment since the 1990s, but well before then, say between 1978 and 1993, the country had already achieved an average annual growth rate of about nine percent—even higher than the impressive seven percent growth rate in East Asia between 1960 and 1980.

China’s poverty-reduction storyline is similarly flawed. While expansion of exports of labor-intensive manufactures lifted many people out of poverty over the past decade, the principal reason for the dramatic decline over the past three decades may lie elsewhere. World Bank estimates suggest that two-thirds of the decline in extremely poor people (those living below the admittedly crude poverty line of one dollar a day per capita at 1993 international parity prices) between 1981 and 2004 had taken place by the mid-1980s. Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s may have been principally the result of domestic factors that have little if anything to do with global integration: a spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, in which output increased at 7.1% per year on average between 1979 and 1984, almost triple the 1970-78 rate; a land reform program, involving a highly egalitarian distribution of land-cultivation rights subject only to differences in regional average and family size, which provided a floor for rural income; and increased farm procurement prices.

As for India, market reforms may not be mainly responsible for its recent high growth. Reform has clearly made the Indian corporate sector more vibrant and competitive, but most of the Indian economy lies outside the corporate sector; for example, 93 percent of the labor force works outside the corporate sector, private or public.

Take the fast-growing service sector, where India’s IT-enabled services have acquired a global reputation while employing less than a quarter of one percent of the total Indian labor force. Service subsectors like finance, business services (including those IT-enabled services), and telecommunication, where reform may have made a significant difference, constitute only about a quarter of total service-sector output. Two-thirds of service output is in traditional or “unorganized” activities, in tiny enterprises often below the policy radar and unlikely to have been directly much affected by regulatory or foreign trade policy reforms. It is a matter of some dispute how much of the growth in traditional services (mostly non-traded) can be explained by a rise in service demand in the rest of the economy, and how much of it is a statistical artifact, since the way output is measured in these traditional services has been rather shaky all along.

As for poverty, the latest Indian household survey data suggest that the rate of decline, if anything, slowed somewhat in 1993-2005—the period of global integration—compared with the ’70s and ’80s. Moreover, some non-income indicators of poverty such as those relating to child health, already rather dismal, have hardly improved in recent years. (For example, the percentage of underweight children in India is much larger than in sub-Saharan Africa and has not changed much in the past decade or so). Growth in agriculture, where much of the poverty is concentrated, has declined somewhat over the past decade, largely because of the decline of public investment in rural infrastructure such as irrigation. Little of this has much to do with globalization. Indeed, some disaggregated studies across districts in India have found trade liberalization slowing down the decline in rural poverty. Such results may indicate the difficulty displaced farmers and workers have had adjusting to new activities and sectors due to various constraints such as minimal access to credit, information, or infrastructural facilities like power and roads; the high-school-dropout rate; and labor market rigidities—even as new opportunities are opened up by globalization.

The pace of poverty reduction in India has been slower than that in China not simply because Chinese growth has been faster, but also because the same one percent growth rate reduces poverty in India by much less, thanks largely to higher wealth inequalities (particularly in land and education). The Gini coefficient (a standard statistical measure of inequality, with a value of one indicating extreme inequality and zero indicating perfect equality) of land distribution in rural India was 0.74 in 2003; the corresponding figure in China was 0.49 in 2002. To a large extent this difference reflects a higher proportion of landless and near-landless people in India. In addition, educational inequality in India is among the worst in the world. According to the World Development Report 2006, the Gini coefficient of the distribution of adult schooling years in the population was 0.56 in India in 1998/2000, which is not only higher than China’s 0.37 in 2000, but even higher than almost all Latin American countries. To a large extent, this indicator reflects the high number of illiterate and near-illiterate people relative to the rest of the population in India.

The storyline about China and India’s “socialist slumber” is equally suspect. China and India have become poster children for market reform and globalization in much of the financial press, even though both countries’ economic policies with regard to privatization, property rights, and deregulation have departed demonstrably from free-market orthodoxy in many ways.

And what about the earlier period? Was it really an utter waste? While socialist control and regulations undoubtedly inhibited initiative and enterprise in both countries, the positive legacy of reforms undertaken in the ‘70s and ‘80s cannot be denied, particularly in China’s recent pattern of state-controlled capitalist growth.

China’s earlier socialist period arguably provided a good launching pad for market reform. That foundation provided wide access to education and health care; highly egalitarian land redistribution that created a rural safety net and thus eased the process of market reform, with all its wrenching disruptions and dislocations; increased female labor participation and education that enhanced women’s contribution to economic growth; and a system of regional economic decentralization (that linked the career paths of Communist Party officials to local area performance). County governments were in charge of production enterprises long before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms set in, and, even more significantly, the earlier commune system’s production brigades evolved into the highly successful township and village enterprises that led the later phenomenal rise of rural industrialization.

In all these respects China’s legacy from the earlier period has been much more distinctive than that in India. When I grew up in India, I used to hear leftists say that the Chinese were better socialists than us. Now I am used to hearing that the Chinese are better capitalists than us. I tell people, only half-flippantly, that the Chinese are better capitalists now because they were better socialists then!

The earlier period’s legacy in both countries is also evident in the cumulative effect of the state’s active role in technological development. It is often overlooked that the Chinese have succeeded in international markets with more than simple labor-intensive products such as clothing, toys, shoes, and wigs. Both China and India (but China more so) have succeeded in exporting more sophisticated products than is usual in countries in their respective per capita income ranges: China, in consumer electronics, including computers and other information- and communication-technology-related goods, and auto parts; India, in software, pharmaceuticals, vehicles, steel, and auto parts. This performance is remarkable (though more in gross value of exports than in value-added terms, as some of the components and technology used in production are acquired from abroad) and is due primarily to sizeable skill and technological bases, enriched over the years of “socialist slumbering” by indigenous learning-by-doing and nurtured by government policies of building domestic capability—sometimes at the expense of static resource allocation efficiency.

Of course, there are many cases in which protection from foreign competition sheltered massive inefficiency. But the overall storyline is by no means so simple. Consider auto parts. For many decades both countries practiced protection of “local content” (of components) in automobiles, contrary to the orthodox free-trade policy prescription. As a result workers in the auto parts industry acquired skills necessary to compete successfully in the global economy and have now reached international best practice.

What about democracy’s role in economic growth? The much more dramatic success of China (and, earlier, that of other East Asian countries under authoritarian regimes) compared with India does not in any way prove the superiority of authoritarianism over democracy in matters of development. Authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for development. That it is not necessary is illustrated not only by today’s developed countries, but by scattered cases of recent development success: Costa Rica, Botswana, and now India. That it is not sufficient is amply evident from disastrous authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere.

The relationship between democracy and development is much more complex than the conventional wisdom suggests. Even if we were not to value democracy for its own sake (or regard it as an integral part of development by definition), and looked at it in a purely instrumental way, democracy has at least four advantages from the point of view of development. Democracies are better able to avoid catastrophic mistakes, (such as China’s Great Leap Forward and the ensuing great famine that killed nearly thirty million people, or its Cultural Revolution, which may have resulted in the largest destruction of human capital in history) and have greater healing powers after difficult times. Democracies also experience more intense pressure to share the benefits of development, thus making it sustainable, and provide more scope for popular movements against industrial fallout such as environmental degradation. In addition, they are better able to mitigate social inequalities (especially acute in India) that act as barriers to social and economic mobility and to the full development of individual potential. Finally, democratic open societies provide a better environment for nurturing the development of information and related technologies, a matter of some importance in the current knowledge-driven global economy. Intensive cyber-censorship in China may seriously limit future innovations in this area.

All that said, India’s experience suggests that democracy can also hinder development in a number of ways. Competitive populism—short-run pandering and handouts to win elections—may hurt long-run investment, particularly in infrastructure, which is the key bottleneck for Indian development. Such political arrangements make it difficult, for example, to charge user fees for roads, electricity, and irrigation, discouraging investment in these areas, unlike in China where infrastructure companies charge full commercial rates. Competitive populism also makes it harder to cut losses resulting from experimentation in industrial policy in India, where retreating from a failed project—with inevitable job losses and bail-out pressures—has electoral consequences that discourage leaders from carrying out policy experimentation in the first place. Finally, democracy’s slow decision-making processes can be costly in a world of fast-changing markets and technology.

China is widely, and rightly, acclaimed for its decentralized development: in the 1980s and ’90s local industries flourished under the control of local governments and collectives. This aspect of industrialization has largely bypassed India so far, even though important constitutional changes favoring devolution of power to local governments were carried out in the ’90s. Of course, decentralization is not always a good thing for development. Some have complained that decentralization in post-Soviet Russia was growth-retarding, as provincial governments were captured by oligarchs, thus legitimizing the subsequent centralization of power by Vladimir Putin. Although egalitarian land reform in China may have helped avert the capture of local institutions by local elites—at least in the initial years of market growth—the problem has plagued regional decentralization in India and Russia.

But even China has had trouble with decentralization in recent years. With local party officials prospering in a reward system that emphasizes local economic performance (with access to profits of local collective enterprises and the power to privatize them), the central government in China is now finding it difficult to rein them in, particularly in matters of land acquisition (where local officials are often in cahoots with local commercial developers), toxic pollution and violation of consumer- product safety regulations (often in collusion with local businesses). The “harmonious society” mantra chanted by the central leadership has not yet succeeded in curbing the capitalist excesses of local business and officialdom. The centralization of tax reform since 1994 has reduced the incentives of the local bureaucracy to serve social needs, particularly in interior provinces. The lack of democratic-accountability mechanisms is, and will continue to be, felt acutely by local populations who face limits both in the types of economic growth they can pursue and in the delivery of social services.

In short, in the absence of democratic devolution, China’s much-celebrated regional decentralization may now be a source of much discontent and may undermine the economic growth it has done so much to foster.

A final element of conventional wisdom is that globalization has led to rising inequality, and that inequality-induced grievances, particularly in rural China, cloud the country’s political future and hence its economic stability. But the effect of globalization on inequality is difficult to disentangle from that of other ongoing changes (such as skill-biased technical progress due to new information and communication technology), and so the causal link between globalization and inequality is not always clear. Moreover, Chinese provinces with more global exposure and higher growth did not have a greater rise in inequality compared with the other provinces in the interior. Decline in agricultural growth in recent years, in both China and India, may also have something to do with the rise in aggregate inequality, as inequality is significantly lower in agriculture than in other sectors.

As for inequality-induced political instability, a frequently cited fact reported from official police records is that incidents of social unrest have multiplied nearly nine-fold between 1994 and 2005. While the Chinese leadership is right to be concerned about inequality, the conventional wisdom in this matter is somewhat askew, as has been pointed out by Harvard sociologist Martin Whyte and his team. Data from their 2004 national representative survey in China show that the presumed disadvantaged in rural or remote areas are not particularly upset by rising inequality. This may be because of the “tunnel effect,” a familiar concept in the literature on inequality: when you see other people prospering you are hopeful that your chance will soon come (you are more hopeful in a tunnel when blocked traffic in the next lane starts moving). This is particularly so with the relaxation of restrictions on migration from villages and improvement in roads and transportation. Farmers are incensed by forcible land acquisitions or the severe environmental damage of land, air, and water than they are by inequality. Chinese leaders have so far succeeded in deflecting the wrath felt toward corrupt local officials and in localizing and containing rural unrest.

It may seem counterintuitive but the potential for unrest is arguably greater in the currently booming urban areas where, along with the breaking of the real estate bubble, a possible global recession could ripple through the excess-capacity industries and financially-shaky public banks. With a more Internet-connected and vocal middle class, a recent history of massive worker layoffs, and a large underclass of migrants, urban unrest could be more difficult to contain.

When faced with political shocks, the Chinese leadership has a tendency to overreact, suppress information, and act heavy-handedly, unnecessarily exacerbating the problem. Still, China now has a very strong economy, which can act as a cushion, and provide more financial resources for assuaging local grievances.

Chinese and Indian economic performance has been far better in the last quarter-century than in the previous two hundred years—and this is one of the striking events in the recent history of the international economy. Other countries must adjust to this reality, and learn to treat the partial restoration of the earlier global importance of these two countries as an opportunity for trade, investment, and exchange of ideas, not as a threat. (We also need to work in tandem with them on the environment.) But we must remember that the story of their rise is more complicated and nuanced than standard accounts make out. That more complex story includes the positive legacy of China and India’s earlier statist periods, which offers general lessons for the process of development much too often ignored.

Source.
This marvelous, balanced research by Pranab Bardhan, a professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is highly recommended.

Knowledge-based Economy? China's Patent Filings are Far Ahead of India

2008-02-25T12:51:00.000-08:00

According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), the number of patents filed from India dropped from 831 in 2006 to 686 in 2007. That represented a decline of 17.45 per cent. India retained the 20th position it had in 2006. On the contrary, applications from China grew 38.1 per cent from 3,951in 2006 to 5,456 in 2007, helping it overtake the Netherlands to the 7th position.

If the long-time trend is considered, application from China rised from 1,295 in 2003 to 5,456 in 2007, a whooping 421% increase. India's application decreased from 764 to 686 during the same period.

China's telecommunication gear giant, Huawei Technologies, is now listed as the No. 4 company in the applicant ranking of all the companies in the world, only after Matsushita Electric Industrial from Japan, Philips Electronics from Netherlands and Siemens from Germany.

For more information, you can visit here and here.

Travel to India? Incredibly unsafe India

2008-02-25T11:31:00.000-08:00

The rape of a 35-year-old foreigner, holding dual citizenship of France and Switzerland, in Pushkar a week ago (the complaint was filed only on Saturday) is the third such incident involving foreign tourists in the last few weeks, in Rajasthan. And this has seriously rattled the ministry of tourism and the tourism industry in general.

Minister Ambika Soni has called a high-level meeting of state tourism secretaries on January 24 to try and find a solution to this serious law and order problem. Recently, Union Tourism Secretary S. Banerjee wrote to all state governments, reminding them of the ministry’s earlier recommendation to deploy special police at popular tourist sites.

The number of foreign tourists in the country has been going up steadily. So has foreign exchange earnings: it was nearly $6,500 million in 2007, up 25 per cent from the previous year. Those in the industry fear the assaults could change all that.

“The dollar is falling, and it has affected our trade. This is somehow being compensated by greater tourist inflow. But if international tourists get concerned about their safety and begin choosing other Asian destinations like China and Singapore over India, the industry is doomed,” says Tahiruddin Tahir, president, Tour Guides Association at the Taj Mahal in Agra.

On Saturday, an American teacher’s wallet was stolen at the Taj. “Such incidents are being noticed and talked about more. The government needs to make tourists feel secure again,” Tahir says.

Agra has reported a number of cases of rape and sexual assault on tourists since September last year.

Ministry officials say law and order, which includes tourist safety, remains a state subject.

Meanwhile, any action the states have taken on Banerjee’s suggestion seems largely token. In Delhi, the tourism police has just about 80 personnel and 10 PCR vans for tourist assistance. This when government statistics reveal the Capital sees the highest number of tourists in the country (20 lakh in 2006). “Ten vans for a destination like Delhi is just not enough. They need to sensitise the entire police force to make tourists feel comfortable,” says a Delhi tourism department official.

Jane Rankin Reid, an Australian who has traveled extensively in India in the last 10 years, says: “I had to learn to cover my shoulders and not show my knees, which is hard to do in the heat. My bottom got pinched in Delhi a few times but to be honest, my bottom got pinched in Rome and London too.” Reid doesn’t subscribe to the view that it’s the colour of her skin that makes her a target. “I don’t think it is because I’m white. None of the sexual come-ons had racial overtones, just the desperation of men not knowing how to respect women.”

Reid has built this opinion over years of staying in India. For most other tourists, such ugly incidents could shape opinion. Countries like the US, UK, Australia, Canada and France have, in travel advisories, already warned citizens on the law and order situation here.

Source

Chinese Engineering: Tibet Railway - By Discovery Channel

2008-02-08T06:17:00.000-08:00

Tibet Diary：Tibet in Two Americans' Eyes

2007-12-26T21:50:00.000-08:00

In 2006 Only , 269 bombings Killed 7000 People In India

2007-12-21T18:23:00.000-08:00

Many hyped India as a politically stable countries. Is that true? Here is a new report from India inside. 269 bombings happened in India in 2006 only with total of 7000, including ncluding 1,711 securitymen. The number is almost twice of the casualities US and its allies experienced in Iraq, an war zone, during the last 3 years.

Don't forget: No big countries are connected with these violence even India does a lot in other countries, includeing China. They are simple uprisings of local people. They request for religious freedom, for their rights, for their independence.

The following full report came from IndianExpress.

There were as many as 269 bombings across India last year and the National Security Guard’s National Bomb Data Centre says J&K topped the list with 78. But this year, Assam alone has seen over 60 explosions, up from 41 last year. In Naxal-hit Chhattisgarh, bombings climbed from 51 in 2005 to 61 last year — and the targets continue to include infrastructure like power transmission lines.

It’s in this backdrop that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will chair a meeting tomorrow of chief ministers on internal security. This upsurge in violence is also taking a terrible toll — 7,000 dead, including 1,711 securitymen, in militancy-related violence in J&K, North-East and the Naxal-affected states since 2004. Add to that another 450, the number of civilians killed in terror strikes, including the Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad blasts.

Assam has reported over 400 deaths in militant violence this year. According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal, 254 civilians, 17 security personnel and 137 militants died in the state until December 11 — a quantum jump from the 174 dead last year. The Union Home Ministry’s own figures say that 501 civilians and security personnel died in militant violence in the North-Eastern states.

Though government figures show a dip in the number of civilians killed in Naxal-related violence (134 until November 21 as against 367 last year), more securitymen have died this year — 204 as against 157 last year.

The only consolation, if it can be called that, comes from J&K where this year’s death toll stood at 252 (civilian and security personnel) in 684 incidents until November 20 — a sharp drop from last year’s figure of 551 in 1,316 incidents.

China's Investments in Africa: Sharing a Common Fate

2007-12-21T18:13:00.000-08:00

This is a report about China's investments in Africa that started in 1950s. Many of them are not for commercial purpose. These videoes are good answers to western propagandas.

China's investment in Africa Part 1

China's investment in Africa Part 2

China's investment in Africa Part 3

India way behind China, world in innovation

2007-12-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

New Delhi: India had a meagre 6,406 patents as compared to 182,385 in China and the world average of 846.71 patents in force in 2004, with the total number of patent filings by Indians per million population standing at 3.40 in 2004-05 as compared to the world average of 250.72 worked out on the basis of the world population of 6377.6 million.

Informing this in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, the India’s Minister of State for Industry Dr Ashwani Kumar also told that the number of patents in India in force was 6,857 in 2005.

According to the Minister, the world average of patents in force in 2004 was worked out on the basis of the world population of 6377.6 million as per the ‘State of World Population 2004’ report by United Nations Population Fund.

The ‘Statistics on Worldwide Patent Activity, 2006 Edition’ of World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) also suggest that the number of patents in force worldwide in 2005 was about 5.6 million, up from 5.4 million in 2004.

However, Kumar said that as these numbers also include patents obtained in different countries for the same invention, it would not be feasible to draw a conclusion on the proportion of patents in force in India vis-à-vis those in force worldwide.

Taking about the steps taken to strengthen the processes to help creation of Intellectual Property Rights in the country, he said that the Government of India has invested Rs 153.00 crore for modernisation of intellectual property offices during the 9th and 10th Five Year Plans.

These include infrastructure development, computerization, human resource development and training and awareness on the processes of IPR.

While four new integrated intellectual property offices were set up in Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, e-filing of patent applications was also made operational in July 2007.

The government has also commenced the work for setting up the National Institute of Intellectual Property Management at Nagpur.

The Minister said that seminars, conferences and workshops at national and international level have been organized for creating awareness and promotion of IPR.

To bring in global cooperation in the field of IPR, the government has signed Memoranda of Understandings with France, US, UK, European Patent Office, Japan, Switzerland and Germany.

Source: http://www.igovernment.in/site/india-way-behind-china-world-in-innovation/

China builds world's largest press forge

2007-12-12T08:08:00.001-08:00

CHENGDU, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) -- China has started the building of an 80,000-ton press forge in Deyang, the southwestern Sichuan Province, paving the way for making large planes, a longtime dream of the nation.

The project, with an investment of 1.517 billion yuan (204.7 million U.S. dollars), has won the approval of the National Development and Reform Commission and is expected to be the world's largest when it is finished in two and a half years, said Zeng Xiangdong, project director and vice general manager of China National Erzhong Group Co. on Friday.

A large die-hydraulic press forge is one of the key instruments in making jumbo planes. Only a few countries, including the United States, Russia and France, have such facilities, according to Zeng.

The current largest press forge is 75,000-tons and is owned by Russia. All the press forges currently in China are below 40,000 tons, which are unfit for making key parts of very large planes and hence hinder the development of the aviation industry, equipment and manufacturing.

Chen Xiaoci, vice director of the press forge project, said the machine is designed by China National Erzhong Group and built in the company's compound.

The company has produced more than 400,000 die-forgings during the past 30-odd years for China's aviation industry, used in all the models of Chinese airplanes.

China started to build very large aircraft in 1970, only two years after Airbus went into production, but the project was later shelved despite a promising start.

After a decades-long suspension, the central government last year revived the blueprint in the 11th five-year plan (2006-2010) in order to meet the country's growing demand for air travel.

To prepare for the very large plane project, China began building its own regional jet, the ARJ-21 -- meaning "advanced regional jet for the 21st century" -- in 2002.

Only the United States, Russia, France, Germany, Britain and Spain currently have the ability to build very large aircraft, with the United State's Boeing and Europe's Airbus taking the lion's share of the international market.

Source.

Stupid Pope Slams Atheism: It Has Led to Cruel and Injust Ideologies

2007-12-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

This is the news. Seems the guy does not know anything about the history of his own religion. He dees not know how brutal his own religion is and the injust ideologies his own religion has.

Just make fun of this guy.

More Than 2 million Kids Under 5 Died in India Last Year Only

2007-12-12T07:30:00.000-08:00

Even Indian government and news medias often brag that or "India is the third largeat economy" and often connect India with "superpower". India's human development is worse than many African countries in many factors.

A new report by the U.N. Children's Fund or UNICEF, reveals that India accounted for more than two million of the 9.7 million children who died in the world before their fifth birthday last year. In other words, one-fifth of the worldwide deaths of children under the age of five occur in the populous South Asian country.

Victor Aguayo at UNICEF in New Delhi says it is now recognized that malnutrition levels in India are "unacceptably high."

The U.N. says India also has the largest pool of children who have never been immunized - about 9.5 million. These children are more vulnerable to diseases such as measles and diphtheria. (Source)

According to the World Factbook published by CIA, India's birth rate is about 2.2%. Simple calculation tells that about 10% of Indian newborns will die before they are 5 years old. That's human disaster.

Details in the report highlighting some stark realities. On the ‘human poverty’ rank devised for 108 developing countries, India ranks 62nd; even Kenya is better than us, at 60th place! This data is for 2004. In the category ‘children underweight for age 0-5’, our rank is 132nd, and India’s adult illiteracy rate is put at 39 per cent. Compare this with the adult illiteracy rate in Rwanda (35.1 per cent) and Malawi (35.9 per cent).

To those who love to talk about a “young India” against an “ageing China” and boast of how over 50 per cent of our population is below 25 years, the data from the CII/WEF study are thought-provoking.

Regular employment represents only 15 per cent of total employment in India, and employment in firms with more than 10 employees - only 4 per cent of total employment. This is the reality of Indian economy. (Source)

The News Dissector: How Does U.S. Mainstream TV Cover Venezuela?

2007-12-12T07:27:00.000-08:00

Catholicals Lie, Fools Believe!

2007-11-13T21:30:00.000-08:00

This report from guardian. It pefectly illustrated a chain of liars in western propogand machines and how the fools were cheated when they talk about China. Enjoy!

Beijing denied a story about an Olympic Bible ban spread by the rightwing media but it was actually a Catholic news service that shut it down

Richard Aregood
Monday November 12, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

China said atheletes are free to bring Bibles for personal use. Photograph: Chris Gardner/AP

The story had everything going for it. It was outrageous. It was emotionally laden. It involved suppression of religion by godless communists. The flurry of attention in the comments section of rightwing political and religious websites was instantaneous. The problem was that it wasn't true.

A recent editorial in the conservative New York Sun kicked off the fuss by citing a report from the Catholic News Service asserting that the Chinese government would bar athletes from bringing Bibles to the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games. Pajamas Media, home of many a rightwing blog, followed up with a report, also citing CNS, and adding the strange cavil "if true".

Actually, the report, citing an Italian sports newspaper as a source, seems to have come from the Catholic News Agency, a totally different operation with a traditional religious outlook, one that features the text of the Pope's Sunday Angelus prayer and a "saint of the day." It was never carried by the Catholic News Service.
Then the Catholic News Service did something remarkable, using its nearly-new website, CNS News Hub. It strongly and convincingly denied ever running such a story and gave the dubious credit to CNA and the Italian paper, then went on to say in detail that there was no substance to the story about a Bible ban.

"We know that with the speed of the Internet and blogs that there was a need to do something like this," said Jim Lackey, the managing editor of CNS. "It's not our feelings about a story. We are just correcting the record."

He added: "When we started getting phone calls from Congressmen and from the state department asking 'what more can you tell me about your story?,' we decided to post the facts as we know them."

The facts, by the way, are that Bibles circulate freely in China, despite the Chinese government's bad record on religion and human rights. An official Chinese government statement said that it would prefer that athletes bring Bibles for personal use only, but stopped well short of a ban.

In fact, Olympic organisers in China said there would be no restrictions on Bibles in the Olympic village. Later, the reporter for the Italian newspaper unconvincingly defended his story by asserting that a ban on "pamphlets and materials used for any religious or political activity or display" meant Bibles, even after the Chinese issued a clarification changing the banned category to "promotional materials".

CNS did not end the flap. Internet controversies seem never to end, especially those that can be kept alive by people whose beliefs run deep. But CNS may have hit on something by clearly disclaiming a story via the web rather than distributing a counterbalancing story later that may never catch up with the original error.

Many Americans, for instance, still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centre, despite six years of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or that he had weapons of mass destruction, despite none having been found over those same six years.

"Were they simply wrong or did they knowingly build a case?," asks Brian Toolan, national editor of the Associated Press, of the Bush administration. "I don't know the answer".

The AP, being a cooperative of its member news outlets, has no website of its own, so it could not completely duplicate the CNS technique. Its practice has always been to quickly correct errors or misstatements on its wire.

But in the era of deliberate misrepresentation, that might not provide the clarification that it is intended to provide. Rudy Giuliani, the candidate for the Republican nomination, has let go with a couple of whoppers in the last couple of weeks, first claiming incorrectly that the British National Health Service has a markedly worse record for prostate cancer survival than is actually the case. Then, providing heavily cooked statistics, he claimed the disgraced Bernard Kerik, his former police commissioner, had been responsible for as much as eliminating crime in New York City.

In traditional, big market journalism, the choices are limited. If a source misrepresents or lies, Toolan said, "You are compelled to go back and correct." For serial offenders, you have to hope that reporters "instinctively and instantly go back and check everything".

Maybe the relatively tiny Catholic wire service has the beginning of an interesting idea. What would be the problem with media outlets, from newspapers to websites to television news, maintaining a website that focuses on mistakes - especially the flat out lies that they have carried?

Ha Ha! More than 2 Million from Democratic Taiwan island Living in Communist Mainland China

2007-11-13T20:28:00.000-08:00

According to ChinaTimes, a leading news resources in Taiwan, more than 2 million people moved from Taiwan to Mainland China. That accounts almost one thenth of Taiwan's population.

Since the political chaos in Taiwan in 1990s, especially the horrible politically fighting on the island, economy is getting worse and worse. More and more are moving to Mainland China for businesses, jobs, education... reasons. They saw a place with promising future comparing with doomming island, and they decided to settle down.

Democracy is not panacea for socialty. Sometimes it could be the root of problems. Taiwan is a good example. The fastest economy growth happened in Taiwan only when the island was led by notorious dictator chiang kai shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo

Who Should Be Responsible for Toy Recalls

2007-11-12T08:05:00.000-08:00

Forbes just published a commentary by Alan G. Hassenfeld, chairman and CEO of Hasbro. His words may reflect some facts:
--Misconception: China is one of the main culprits in all these recalls; it is their fault that our children are in danger.
--Fact: That is simply not true. Companies manufacture, import and sell products; countries do not. The Consumer Product Safety Commission rightly holds those who order the toys and bring them into the country responsible for the safety of those toys. Equally important is the fact that about 74% of the toys recalled were for design-related issues, not manufacturing-related ones. The designs are the primary responsibility of those who order the toys, not only of those who manufacture them. Let us take responsibility for our actions and not blame others.

--Misconception: China is responsible for the loss of American jobs in the toy industry.
--Fact: Again, not true; China is simply the latest country where production has concentrated so that its cheaper labor costs can translate into lower prices to consumers. Toy production started moving out of the United States over 50 years ago, going first to Japan, then to Taiwan and Korea and other Asian countries. It was in the mid-1980s that China began its export of toys.

Another study written by Professor Paul W. Beamish of the University of Western Ontario, Hari Bapuji and Andre Laplume, both of the University of Manitoba, also proved that China-made toys are at least as safe as any other countries, or even better. The toys made in other countries are even more likely caused by the manufacturing process, unlike in China, more likely caused by design faults.

In 2004, four firms recalled 150 million pieces of toy jewelery made in India because they contained excessive amounts of lead. In 2002, approximately 75,000 South Korean-made pedal-cars, retailing at between 100 to 300 US dollars, were recalled because of their high lead content, says the study.

Dalai Lama, A Hero in the Western World

2007-10-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

Western media portrayed Dalai Lama is a peaceful person. You need to look at these pictures.

Skin from serfs' kids

Skin from serfs

Skin from a serf

Tibetan Lamaism Drum made by human skin.

Tibetan Lamaism flute made by human bone of legs, called gandong in tibetan laguage.

Tibetan Lamaism instrument for worship ceremony made by human Skull and finger bones.

A dying serf

A serf was fighting dogs for dog food.

Tibet tourture room used owned by Lama and landlord classes. This interesting room was still in operation as late as right before the communist revolution. Now a museum in Tibet.

A kind of serf locker. 4 serfs could be locked together

Serf's hand was chopped off by his owner

Serfs were chained by their owner

This was what Dalai used. Made from human head.

A serf whose eyes were removed for punishment by his owner

Anther serf whose eyes were removed for punishment.

So many serfs whose legs were cut off for punishment by his owner

A horn made from a serf's leg bone. It's serf owner's property.

Skin peeled off from a kid

Legs, arms, eyes from serfs because of the punishment.

Microsoft Website Blocked by Chinese Government

2007-10-10T11:19:00.000-07:00

Some people on a forum recommended http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org to check if a web is blocked by Chinese government.

I checked http://www.microsoft.com, the official website for the largest software company on this planet, and interestly found that it was blocked.

The more I tested and more interesting things I found.

I then tested http://www.xinhuanet.com/ and http://www.gov.cn/ the web portals for Chinese Xinhua News Press and Chinese government (Both have English version. Go to click the English). Both were blocked too.

It is very funny that many non-brain westerners belive in that website (go to check the discussion section of that website).

US-design Runs into Trouble Again

2007-09-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

Right after Mattel's late apology to China for its own design flaws that caused 85% of its toys recalls, another US company, Simplicity, is recalling one million infant cribs after 3 deaths caused by its design flaws.

This time many western medias became smarter a little bit. They did not put "made in China" phrase in their news titles, but some indecent, misleading medias such as ABC Action News in Florida, WNBC in New York, RTT news in New York, Medical News in UK, The Gate - National Journal in Washington DC，Conde Nast Portfolio in New York, Kansas City Star in Missouri, Forbes, Reuters, CBC News, CNN, ... are still associating "China-made" with the recalls and ignoring the root of the cause: US-design.

China is a scapegoat of US-design again!!

US Media Still Trying to Save Their Own Face After Mattel's Apology to China

2007-09-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

Just in my previous post, Mattel openly aplogied to China for the damage caused by its own mistakes. It openly acknowledged that most of recent toy recalls were caused by its own design flaws. This late confession vastly differentiates with US media's unanimous blame on China companies' production quality and misleading their own readers.

Even before this simple and straight facts, US media are still trying to misleading their readers. For example, Newsweek just published Daniel Gross's artile on its web. They still stubbornly think Mattel's apologied because it must save face with China for business purpose. They don't blame themselves and Mattel for their own corrupt moral standard.

Newsweek and its writer Daniel Gross will never know how open this world is. US media cannot hide the truth and misleading readers now. Mattel is a dead company because its product quality and more important its moral standard. Newsweek is not very far.

Anyhow, they have to acknowledge that America can’t afford to offend or alienate China—not because it would suddenly stop selling goods to us, but because the U.S. economy has evolved in such a way that its health depends on China.

Congratuations, you can make some progress. Keep going! Thanks Newsweek to show their true face before the world and before the truth. This could be a very classic case in Journalists' class in colleges.

Late apology from Mattel to Chinese for the Toy Recalls

2007-09-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

Mattel who recalled a lot of toys in US market acknowledges the major causes of the recalls are the company's design faults. Chinese companies only contributed a very small portion of the recalled. He company said it recalled more products than justified.

The company apologies for the damage on the reputation of Chinese manufacturers. The apology is too late as I have several posts on the issue and pointed Mattel's prolem long time ago. But better late than never.

The source of the following report come from here.

BEIJING - U.S.-based toy giant Mattel Inc. issued an extraordinary apology to China on Friday over the recall of Chinese-made toys, taking the blame for design flaws and saying it had recalled more lead-tainted toys than justified.

The gesture by Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel’s executive vice president for worldwide operations, came in a meeting with Chinese product safety chief Li Changjiang, at which Li upbraided the company for maintaining weak safety controls.

“Our reputation has been damaged lately by these recalls,” Debrowski told Li in a meeting at Li’s office at which reporters were allowed to be present.

“And Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys,” Debrowski said.

Mattel ordered three high-profile recalls this summer involving more than 21 million Chinese-made toys, including Barbie doll accessories and toy cars because of concerns about lead paint and tiny magnets that could be swallowed.

The recalls have prompted complaints from China that manufacturers were being blamed for design faults introduced by Mattel.

On Friday, Debrowski acknowledged that “vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel’s design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China’s manufacturers.”

Lead-tainted toys accounted for only a small percentage of all toys recalled, he said, adding that: “We understand and appreciate deeply the issues that this has caused for the reputation of Chinese manufacturers.”

In a statement issued by the company, Mattel said its lead-related recalls were “overly inclusive, including toys that may not have had lead in paint in excess of the U.S. standards.

“The follow-up inspections also confirmed that part of the recalled toys complied with the U.S. standards,” the statement said.

Li reminded Debrowski that “a large part of your annual profit ... comes from your factories in China.

“This shows that our cooperation is in the interests of Mattel, and both parties should value our cooperation. I really hope that Mattel can learn lessons and gain experience from these incidents,” Li said, adding that Mattel should “improve their control measures.”

Since this summer’s recall, Mattel has announced plans to upgrade its safety system by certifying suppliers and increasing the frequency of random, unannounced inspections. It has fired several manufacturers.

Tests had found that lead levels in paint in recalled toys were as high as 110,000 parts per million, or nearly 200 times higher than the accepted safety ceiling of 600 parts per million.

Mattel’s shares fell from the mid-$23 level following the first recall in early August, reaching as low as $20.97 on Sept. 10. They have since rebounded to the mid-$23 level again.

China has become a center for the world’s toy-making industry, exporting $7.5 billion worth of toys last year.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press

When Americans are High about Darfur, How About the Real Genocide In Iraq?

2007-09-17T14:42:00.001-07:00

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.

In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

(Source)

Where is the voice from Steven Spielberg about genocide in Iraq?

Greenspan's late confession: Iraq war was really for oil

2007-09-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.

Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.

Some Data about Toy Recalls In US

2007-08-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

China’s General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine defended the country’s manufacturers, saying Mattel should face up to its responsibility for the recall of millions of Chinese-made toys, as 85 percent of the recalled toys had problematic designs (Using magnets in its toys.).

Among the recalled 20.2 million toys, 85% were caused by faulty designs that were either provided by Mattel or met Mattel's design standards. That means Mattel should be the only responsibilty holder for this part of the recalls. China companies should be responsible for the other 15% of the toy recalls.

According to the data, in 2006 alone, Chine exported 22 billion toys.

According to the above data, Mattel alone caused much more recalls that all Chinese companies. Who should be blamed?

More important is that the mattel design flaws should be mattel's own problems, but this were ignored by "free" western medias.

The toy recall saga clearly shows westerns political panics because of the China's rising. This is just one of the challenges for China. In other words, political panics caused by China's rising lead to the panics on China products. But the real responsibility holder: American companies, were ignored.

BULL$#!+ - Dalai Lama

2007-08-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

Japan: Food from China Better than Foof from US

2007-07-24T02:59:00.000-07:00

Japanese government released some data about food imports in 2006.

The data show that only 0.58% of the food from China could not meet Japanese standards. But 1.31% from US caused safety concerns. 0.62 from EU were sunstandard.

Japan has very strict policies for agricultural product imports for protecting incompetitive domestic agriculture.

The data come from:
http://finance.sina.com.cn/world/gjjj/20070724/05513813298.shtml

Investors be Aware: Credit-rating Companies May not Have Credit

2007-07-22T03:47:00.000-07:00

The following article come from here. Hope investors don't ignore this news.

(Fortune Magazine) -- While Bear Stearns is the most recent financial institution to find itself caught up in the subprime-mortgage quagmire, the three credit-rating agencies - Standard & Poor's, Moody's (Charts), and Fitch - may be the next ones to see their good names dragged through the mud.

The reason? Ohio attorney general Marc Dann is building a case against them based on the role he believes their ratings played in the marketing of risky mortgage-related securities.

"The ratings agencies cashed a check every time one of these subprime pools was created and an offering was made," Dann told Fortune, referring to the way the bond issuers paid to get their asset-backed securities (ABSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) rated by the agencies. These ratings run from AAA for debt with the lowest risk of default all the way down to noninvestment- grade bonds, which many pension funds are prohibited from purchasing in their charters. "[The agencies] continued to rate these things AAA . [So they are] among the people who aided and abetted this continuing fraud," adds Dann.

Ohio has the third-largest group of public pensions in the United States, and they've got exposure: The Ohio Police & Fire Pension Fund has nearly 7 percent of its portfolio in mortgage- and asset-backed obligations.

Moody's says that Dann's accusations are nonsense. "We perform a very significant but extremely limited role in the credit markets. We issue reasoned, forward-looking opinions about credit risk," says Fran Laserson, vice president of corporate communications at Moody's. "Our opinions are objective and not tied to any recommendations to buy and sell." She further points out that while some securities have lost significant value, none have actually defaulted. (S&P and Fitch declined to comment.)

Dann and a growing legion of critics contend that the agencies dropped the ball by issuing investment-grade ratings on securities backed by subprime mortgages they should have known were shaky. To his mind, the seemingly cozy relationship between ratings agencies and investment banks like Bear Stearns only heightens the appearance of impropriety. In addition to receiving fees from bond issuers that want ratings, S&P, Moody's, and Fitch do not vet data provided by these customers - information the agencies use to make their credit assessments. It's a bit like a take-home final. Or as Moody's puts it in its own code of conduct, "Moody's has no obligation to perform, and does not perform, due diligence." The other two agencies have similar provisions.

Moody's and its cohorts might have some wiggle room. "The agencies are on fairly strong ground that their ratings are just opinions, but that doesn't absolve them from liability risk," says Steve Thel, a securities law professor at Fordham University.

Dann contends also that the ratings are used as benchmarks by institutional investors. He is not alone in this assessment. According to experts in structured finance valuations, the ratings agencies are the central drivers, particularly in the riskier areas of asset-backed securities markets. The pool of buyers would be much smaller without a rating because pension and mutual funds hold only investment-grade bonds, says Christopher Whalen, who sold asset-backed securities at Bear Stearns and is now a principal at Institutional Risk Analytics, which provides tools to credit officers to assess bonds.

"The rating drives everything," adds Sylvain Raynes, a former Moody's analyst and currently a principal at R&R Consulting, a firm that examines these securities.

Others point out that CDOs are too complex for even sophisticated investors to parse, so the ratings take on great importance. "It is unreasonable to think that people could do the quantum math to figure out the ultimate aggregate default rate on a CDO. So, yes, there is a greater expectation that the gatekeepers will scrutinize the underlying credit," says Doug Cifu, a partner who specializes in private equity and finance at Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison.

Regardless of whether a lawsuit materializes, the ratings agencies already seem to be policing themselves. Of the pool of securities created from 2006 subprime mortgages, Moody's has downgraded 19 percent of the issues they've rated and put 30 percent on a watch list. Sadly for Wall Street, if the ratings agencies feel the need to downgrade even more, it will certainly constrict the cheap debt that has fueled the bull market.

Or as Whalen puts it, "The Street dragged everyone into increasingly bizarre and illiquid instruments, and there was huge profitability there, but what it did was buy itself a lot of trouble."

US Media Ignored New report on Chinese Tires

2007-07-19T23:41:00.000-07:00

FTS who impoted tires from China filed a supplenmtal report on 07/03/2007 to NHTSA.
The report is on the top place of first page on NHTSA website.

Two important points are new to many westerners because their free media intentionally ignored:
1. The tires addressed by the report meet or exceed FMVSS 119.
2. The van involved in the accident in Philadelphia, Pa had wrong tires. It had three China-made tires sized 245/75R16 and one Michelin tire sized 225175R16. A review of the tire guide indicates that the Michelin tire was the correct size for that vehicle while the China-made tires were not.

Joel Goebel relives: f.u.c.k.u.Germany

2007-07-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

The following is a response to Chinese by a German comany that put "f.u.c.k.u.china" words on its logo. You could understand that why Joel Goebel was a German. Germans are really propaganda genius. I would take it for granted that Germans welcome all of us say "f.u.c.k.u.Germany" since stands for “the fascinating & urban collection: kiss you Germany”.

　　Dear Sirs,

　　Here some explanation concerning a logo we used for a special and limited T-shirt edition produced last season.

　　On this specific T-shirt collection we had printed the letters f.u.c.k.u.china.

　　The PHILIPP PLEIN Int. AG company would like to explain what lies behind this abbreviation and give the following statement:

　　f.u.c.k.u.china stands for “the fascinating & urban collection: kiss you China ”.

　　We would like to specify that we never intended to hurt or offend the citizens of China .

　　On the contrary, with this collection we wanted to thank China because it gives us the possibility to produce some articles of our collection on a competitive price basis.

　　In addition, the man craft we found in China is very precise and leads to a good quality of the clothes.

　　This is a great satisfaction for us and for our end customers.

　　We are a young and dynamic company and this is why we intituled this limited T-shirt edition “fascinating and urban” collection and “kiss” is a way to thank the Chinese savoir-faire.

　　Since we have been pointed out that the message is not clear and leads to controversy, these T-shirts - that were already limited to start with (max. 100 T-shirts have been produced) - have been retired from the market.

　　Once again, we are sincerely sorry if the abbreviation of the logo has been misinterpreted. We never wanted to offend anyone.

　　Thank you for comprehension.

　　Philipp Plein International AG

　　Säntisstrasse 7

　　8580 Amriswil

　　Tel.: 0041-71-414-2550

　　Fax: 0041-71-414-2560

What US Media's Report on Chinese Products can Prove?

2007-07-11T21:01:00.000-07:00

Black pepper with salmonella from India. Crabmeat from Mexico that is too filthy to eat. Candy from Denmark that is mislabeled.

At a time when Chinese imports are under fire for being contaminated or defective, federal records suggest that China is not the only country that has problems with its exports.

In fact, federal inspectors have stopped more food shipments from India and Mexico in the last year than they have from China, an analysis of data maintained by the Food and Drug Administration shows.

China has had much-publicized problems with contaminated seafood — including a temporary ban late last month on imports of five species of farm-raised seafood from China — but federal inspectors refused produce from the Dominican Republic and candy from Denmark more often.

For instance, produce from the Dominican Republic was stopped 817 times last year, usually for containing traces of illegal pesticides. Candy from Denmark was impounded 520 times.

By comparison, Chinese seafood was stopped at the border 391 times during the last year.

This is a part from New York Times.

But the question is that why China is singled out by US government and its propaganda machines? The bombing by US media make everyone have a strong impression that China is the only place that low-quality products originate. The gust of US media on Chinese products in recent month only proves some views:
1. US is not a media free country. The voice of the media in US is controlled by some interest or political group or even government.
2. US media's reports do not reflect the fact of this world. They are often misleading.
If you understand the above two abvious points, you can understand why Americans are so stupid about what is going on on this world.

Thanks for US media bombing, a stupid US company event plans to label its products "China-free"

Are China's products really so dangerous? Other than the above report from NYT, another article appeared on ActionNews about the seafood from China. The director of the Mississippi Poison Control Center says Chinese catfish tainted with outlawed antibiotics pose no threat to those who eat it. A medical toxicologist who works as an emergency room physician at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, says a person would have to eat 220,000 pounds of the fish to get a full adult dose of the antibiotic. Do any American eat 220,000 pounds of fish in their life? It is impossible. The official claimed that the seafood from China is safe and he himself feed his family with the products from China.

It is for sure there are some low-quality products are from China. But low-quality products are from any conrner of this world. US is not problem-free. That why I said the company is stupid that plans to lable its products "China-free"?China supplies 70-80% of the toys in this world. Do the 80% of the toy recalls in US regard China products?

Some low-quality products from China can not blame China alone. Greedy American companies should take a lot of the responsiblities.

Many people know the outsourcing. Outsourcing does not only happens in IT industry, but also in manufacturing. Huge a lot of products from China are actually designed by US companies. They give the design and provide the material requirement or even provide materials.

Greedy American companies also push the product price to unreasonable low when they buy products from China. Every one know that you get what you pay. The unreasonable price can only force producers to make low quality products. I am pretty sure that many products in those supper-low price stores are pro-problems no matter they are made in China or not. We take wal-mart as an example: wal-mart pays Chinese companies US$20 billion each year and Chinese products account for 80% of its sales of more than US$300 billion. Simple calculation will tell you that Wal-mart makes $12 for every dollar it pays to China. Do you see the problem?

China is a country that can supply products from low-end textile or even some substandard to high-end electronics or even parts for commercial planes. But one thing is for sure that China can produce the same products at same quality at much lower cost. "China-free" does not mean "problem-free", but it surely means one thing: Unreasonably expensive.

China's lessons for the World Bank

2007-06-30T01:57:00.000-07:00

As the World Bank clings to its free-market ideology, China is providing more practical help for developing countries.

Jeffrey Sachs

The China Daily recently ran a front-page story recounting how Paul Wolfowitz used threats and vulgarities to pressure senior World Bank staff. The newspaper noted that Wolfowitz sounded like a character out of the mafia television show The Sopranos. At the same time, while the Wolfowitz scandal unfolded, China was playing host to the Africa Development Bank (ADB), which held its board meeting in Shanghai. This is a vivid metaphor for today's world: while the World Bank is caught up in corruption and controversy, China skilfully raises its geopolitical profile in the developing world.

China's rising power is, of course, based heavily on its remarkable economic success. The ADB meeting took place in the Pudong district, Shanghai's most remarkable development site. From largely unused land a generation ago, Pudong has become a booming centre of skyscrapers, luxury hotels, parks, industry, and vast stretches of apartment buildings. Shanghai's overall economy is currently growing at around 13% per year, thus doubling in size every five or six years. Everywhere there are startups, innovations, and young entrepreneurs hungry for profits.

I had the chance to participate in high-level meetings between Chinese and African officials at the ADB meetings. The advice that the African leaders received from their Chinese counterparts was sound, and much more practical than what they typically get from the World Bank.

Chinese officials stressed the crucial role of public investments, especially in agriculture and infrastructure, to lay the basis for private-sector-led growth. In a hungry and poor rural economy, as China was in the 1970s and as most of Africa is today, a key starting point is to raise farm productivity. Peasant farmers need the benefits of fertiliser, irrigation, and high-yield seeds, all of which were a core part of China's economic takeoff.

Two other critical investments are also needed: roads and electricity, without which there cannot be a modern economy. Farmers might be able to increase their output, but it won't be able to reach the cities, and the cities won't be able to provide the countryside with inputs. The officials stressed how the government has taken pains to ensure that the power grid and transportation network reaches every village in China.

Of course, the African leaders were most appreciative of the next message: China is prepared to help Africa in substantial ways in agriculture, roads, power, health, and education. And the African leaders already know that this is not an empty boast. All over Africa, China is financing and constructing basic infrastructure. During the meeting, the Chinese leaders emphasised their readiness to support agricultural research as well. They described new high-yield rice varieties, which they are prepared to share with their African counterparts.

All of this illustrates what is wrong with the World Bank, even aside from Wolfowitz's failed leadership. Unlike the Chinese, the bank has too often forgotten the most basic lessons of development, preferring to lecture the poor and force them to privatise basic infrastructure, rather than to help the poor to invest in infrastructure and other crucial sectors.

The bank's failures began in the early 1980s, when, under the ideological sway of President Ronald Reagan and prime minister Margaret Thatcher, it tried to get Africa and other poor regions to cut back or close down government investments and services. For 25 years, the bank tried to get governments out of agriculture, leaving impoverished peasants to fend for themselves. The result has been a disaster in Africa, with farm productivity stagnant for decades. The bank also pushed for privatisation of national health systems, water utilities, and road and power networks, and grossly underfinanced these critical sectors.

This extreme free-market ideology, also called "structural adjustment", went against the practical lessons of development successes in China and the rest of Asia. Practical development strategy recognises that public investments - in agriculture, health, education, and infrastructure - are necessary complements to private investments. The World Bank has instead wrongly seen such vital public investments as an enemy of private-sector development.

Whenever the bank's extreme free-market ideology failed, it has blamed the poor for corruption, mismanagement, or lack of initiative. This was Wolfowitz's approach, too. Instead of focusing the bank's attention on helping the poorest countries to improve their infrastructure, he launched a crusade against corruption. Ironically, of course, his stance became untenable when his own misdeeds came to light. The bank can regain its relevance only if it becomes practical once again, by returning its focus to financing public investments in priority sectors, just as the Chinese leadership is prepared to do.

The good news is that African governments are getting the message on how to spur economic growth, and are also getting crucial help from China and other partners that are less wedded to extreme free-market ideology than the World Bank. Many African governments at the Shanghai meeting declared their intention to act boldly, by investing in infrastructure, agricultural modernisation, public health, and education.

The Wolfowitz debacle should be a wake-up call to the World Bank: it must no longer be controlled by ideology. If that happens, the bank can still do justice to the bold vision of a world of shared prosperity that prompted its creation after the second world war.

Source.

China, Big Winner in Global IPO Market

2007-06-21T00:06:00.000-07:00

Global IPO activity soared to US$227 billion with 1,559 IPOs in 2006 from US$167 billion in 2005, according to figures released today by Ernst & Young (data provided by Ernst & Young, Dealogic and Thomson Financial).

Chinese companies raised $56.6 billion — the world No. 1 in 2006. China was followed by US companies with total proceeds of $34.1 billion, and Russian companies with $18 billion was placed in the third place.

2006 saw the biggest IPO ever with the listing of ICBC in China, raising almost US$22 billion alone. In second and third place came the IPOs for Bank of China Ltd and Rosneft with each raising more than US$10 billion, beating last year's most significant IPO for China Construction Bank. Four out of the top 10, and six out of the top 20, deals were from emerging markets.

HKSE (Hong Kong) came out number one with 17% of the total capital raised worldwide. In second place with 15% was LSE.

In 2005, Chinese companies raised US$24.2 billion from stock market, second only to US's US$33.08 billion.

Another Asian giant raised US$7.23 billion from the capital market.

The source for the above data:
http://www.ey.com/GLOBAL/content.nsf/International/Media_-_Press_Release_-_IPO_Survey_Year_End_2006
http://www.ey.com/global/download.nsf/International/IPO_-_Global_IPO_Survey_2006/$file/E&Y-SGM-GlobalIPOSurvey2006.pdf
http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=167762

China Links Two 20-Mile Bridges

2007-06-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

The final link in a 20-mile bridge, said to be the world's longest cable-stayed structure of its kind, was connected Monday over China's Yangtze River, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The 6.45 billion yuan ($846 million) Sutong Bridge, linking the cities of Nantong and Changshu near the garden city of Suzhou, has the longest span of any cable-stayed bridge, at 3,569.55 feet, the report said.

The span of a bridge is the distance between the structure's main towers. The previous longest span in a cable-stayed bridge was the Tatara Bridge in Japan, part of a series of bridges linking the main Japanese island of Honshu with Shikoku. Its longest span is 2,920 feet.

The Yangtze River Delta, where the bridge is located, is in the midst of a massive construction boom that is bringing modern transport links to the Shanghai region, one of China's fastest growing industrial hubs.

On June 26, authorities plan to inaugurate the 22.5-mile Hangzhou Bay bridge, a structure that will link Shanghai with the port city of Ningbo to the south.

Source.

Sutong Bridge. Construction of the bridge started in June 2003 and will be finished in 2008.

The location of Hangzhou Bay Bridge. The construction of the bridge started in June 2003 too. The bridge will be completed in 2009

Auto sales keep roaring In China

2007-06-18T23:47:00.000-07:00

Automakers produced over three million automobiles in China from January to April, of which 2,934,000 units were sold, a year-on-year growth of 21.36 and 21.46 percent respectively, as shown in statistics from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM).

More information can be obtained at Chinadaily

Chinese Go after Broadband when cell phone becoming hot in India

2007-06-18T23:37:00.001-07:00

Some data from guardian's news:

According to the internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million.

US leads the pack with more than 60 million subscribers.

China now has more than 56 million from 41 million users a year ago.

Japan ranked third, with 26.5 million broadband users at the end of March this year.

Germany is fourth at more than 16 million.

France takes the fifth spot with 15.3 million.

Penetration in China is 14.35% while in India penetration stands at just 1.15% of the country's estimated 200 million households.

Obviously, most of Indians can only afford US$25 cell phones, but not for more expensive personal computers for internet.

Biggest Demoracy or Biggest Chaos

2007-06-14T21:32:00.001-07:00

India escapes U.S. list of worst human traffickers

2007-06-13T02:01:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- India, which advocacy groups say may have as many as 65 million forced laborers, was spared the worst ranking on the State Department's new list of nations where humans are bought and sold.

The annual Trafficking in Persons report, released Tuesday, says that as many as 800,000 people -- largely women and children -- are trafficked across borders each year. Many are forced into prostitution, sweatshops, domestic labor, farming and child armies.

U.S. officials told CNN the question of India's ranking caused a heated debate between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.

Negroponte wanted India listed as a Tier 3 country, or worst offender. Rice overruled him out of concern about alienating the Indian government. India is on the Tier 2 watch list.

Rice agreed to undertake a special evaluation of India in six months, and then take action if India does not make improvements.

Mark Lagon, ambassador at large for the State Department's Trafficking in Persons office, said Tuesday that "many different variables" played into the decision.

The United States, however, is not immune to the problem. The State Department estimates 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States each year.

India was put on the watch list for the fourth year in a row "for its failure to show increasing efforts to tackle India's large and multidimensional problem," according to the report.

The report found while the Indian government was making significant efforts to combat trafficking, it "did not recognize the country's huge population of bonded laborers," which advocacy groups estimate to range from 20 million to 65 million.

The report also found efforts by Indian law enforcement agencies to punish traffickers "uneven and largely inadequate."

For more details, please refer CNN.

Faked Deaths Show Ills Of India's Police

2007-06-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

(AP) As far as nearly everyone knew, Gurnam Singh Bandala was gunned down in a shootout with police 13 years ago during the waning days of an uprising by Sikh separatists.

That is, until Bandala turned up alive, living as a preacher outside this northern Indian city.

"It's the perfect cover, being dead," says Bandala, the classic image of a towering Sikh with his white robe, deep blue turban and long gray beard.

Authorities now believe an innocent farmer was deliberately killed by police so that they could present his body as Bandala's and collect a $60,000 bounty.

"I thought I was so lucky," Bandala told The Associated Press in an interview. But "there was no luck. There was murder."

Bandala's re-emergence is one of nearly a dozen similar cases reviewed by the AP that have surfaced recently in India. The faked police shootouts have shaken an already troubled justice system in a country that touts itself as a rights-respecting democracy where the rule of law prevails.

Former police officials and human rights activists say the fake encounters are the brutal result of a system dominated by poorly educated, badly trained and corruptible cops, dirty politicians and stagnated courts where justice, if it ever comes, can be delayed for years.

"Because cases take years to be settled, because witnesses don't show up, because bribes are paid, criminals get away. So the police resort to shortcuts," says Sankar Sen, a former policeman who's now a fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences in New Delhi.

The exact number of fake encounters is impossible to determine. Police officials acknowledge only a handful over the past two decades and say they are isolated cases.

But the former and current officers say the problem is more widespread, and rights activists estimated the number must be in the hundreds, if not thousands.

They point to the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared, many after being detained by police during one of the myriad insurgencies here in the last three decades. An estimated 3,000 people were lost without explanation during the Sikh uprising in Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s. About 10,000 are missing in Kashmir, where an Islamic rebellion festers today.

In Punjab, the fight for a separate Sikh state left about 25,000 people dead, including 1,700 police. Bandala is one of three former separatist militants who were said to have been killed in shootouts but who recently turned up alive.

"Somebody was killed in their place," says Ranjan Lakhanpal, a human rights lawyer. "We believe there are many more."

In Kashmir, a Himalayan region wracked by an Islamic rebellion since 1989, police this year began investigating five cases, all involving security forces who may have killed innocents and claimed they were rebels to earn rewards.

And in Gujarat, a western state riven by tensions between Hindus and Muslims, three policemen and three senior officials have been arrested for their alleged role in the 2005 slaying of a Muslim couple. Authorities earlier had said the husband was part of a plot by Islamic militants to kill the state's top elected official, a Hindu nationalist.

However, the Kashmir and Gujarat probes are exceptions and most allegations never are fully checked, says Ajai Sahni, former chief of India's Intelligence Bureau, part of the country's law-enforcement apparatus. "They're the result of dogged investigations by good policemen. That rarely happens."

One reason few cases are investigated is that most Indians aren't interested. Wealthier Indians in particular have long accepted extrajudicial killings disguised as shootouts as the most expedient way to get rid of criminals.

There's even a reverential term for officers with the highest tallies: "encounter specialists."

"There is pressure from politicians, there is pressure from the public," says Sen, the former policeman. "They wat criminals eliminated, they cheer it."

Sen spent 35 years with the police, eventually running the National Police Academy before leaving the force to head the government's National Human Rights Commission.

He says that when he was a top officer years ago in the eastern state of Orissa, a politician, whom he won't name, told him to kill a troublesome bandit.

Sen says he refused, "but other policemen were more cooperative." The bandit was slain.

Police kill not only career criminals, but also stage shootouts to get promotions or rewards. That was the case with Bandala.

Bandala already was in hiding for a decade when he read, in July 1994, about his own death in a local newspaper. He worried at first, "then I realized the police wouldn't be chasing me anymore," he said.

At the same time, a woman who lived a few villages over would start looking for her husband, Sukhpal Singh.

According to court documents filed by Singh's family, police came to their home in August and picked up the farmer, then 26, for questioning.

"He disappeared like a ghost," says his widow, Dalbir Kaur. "We've never seen him again."

When Kaur and her mother-in-law went looking for Singh, the police who took him said he'd been transferred to another station. So they went there only to be told he'd been sent back to the first.

It went on and on. Months stretched into years. Singh's mother died and his family sold their small farm to pay for lawyers who are seeking $12,500 in a wrongful death suit.

Authorities have never told them what happened to Singh. But a senior Punjab police officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains sensitive, said authorities believe Singh was killed in Bandala's place. His body was presented as that of Bandala's and then cremated in accordance with Sikh custom.

Asked what happened to the two officers who were first credited with the killing _ and claimed the reward _ he said one, Jaspal Singh, a former deputy superintendent of police, is in jail, convicted of torturing and murdering a human rights activist. The other, Paramraj Singh Umrananagal, is now a senior Punjab police officer. He refused to speak about the case.

Bandala, meanwhile, was caught by police in 1998 and spent four years in prison on charges of carrying illegal weapons. He was convicted under his real name, but the public record _ which lists Bandala as deceased _ was never changed.

"Nobody likes to be embarrassed," the official said.

The news comes from here.

China's AVS codec gains more top-tier support

2007-06-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

SHANGHAI — More top-tier chipmakers are offering support for a Chinese codec that will be used in the domestic IPTV, satellite and possibly the cable TV market.

Both Broadcom Corp. and Conexant Systems Inc. are working on chips for China's Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS). They join STMicroelectronics, which already supports the codec in software, and is spinning a hardware optimized version that will be ready by the fourth quarter.

In that same time period, one of Broadcom's 65-nanometer based products will include custom hardware accelerators to support AVS, said Aidan O'Rourke, a Broadcom executive in charge of IPTV products.

Conexant plans to have its silicon ready for sampling by the first quarter of 2008, a spokeswoman said. Texas Instruments is also able to offer DSP-based support.

A handful of Chinese chip companies are also targeting AVS for set-top boxes. SVA Co and Beijing-based United Source Coding Co. have developed an encoder and Longjing Microelectronics Co., Grandview Semiconductor, and Celestial Semiconductor are working on decoders.

Source: EETimes

Incomplete List of Political Violences in India Since April 2006

2007-06-04T00:35:00.000-07:00

This post only covers the deadly violences that caused causalties for political reasons in India between April 2006 and Agust 2007, such as police killings, rebellion killings, killings for political hatred and the killings for religionous reasons. This is a post that response to Indian's boasting about the superiority and the stability of their political system.

I don't think this list will cover all of those cases since I am only a blogger. Also the collection started in May 2007. A lot more incidents before then were missed in this post.

I decided to stop the collecting due to the limited time I can spend on it. But the post clearly show what is India's situation. It will answer your questions such as:
Is India politically stable?
Is India a real democratic country as India cliams?
Is India shining?

Make your judgements by truth.

BTW, recently twin bomb blasts killed at least 43 and injured more than 100 people 08/26 at India's cyber-city of Hyderabad.

08/13/2007: Source. Four Hindi speakers have been killed by separatist militants in India's north-eastern Assam state, police say. The latest deaths bring to more than 30 the number of people killed in rebel attacks in Assam in the past six days.

08/13/2007: Source. Three persons including a teenage boy were killed and 16 others injured, some of them critically in a powerful grenade explosion carried out by suspected militants in North Kashmir this afternoon.

08/13/2007: Source. Army on Monday shot dead two militants of Karbi Longri National Liberation Front (KLNLF), responsible for slaughtering 29 Hindi-speaking settlers in Assam's Karbi Anglong district since August 8.

08/12/2007: Source. Suspected rebels killed four Hindi-speaking migrant workers before dawn Sunday and three more bodies were found from an earlier killing in India's insurgency-wracked northeast, police said, bringing the death toll from a week of violence to 30.

08/11/2007: Source. Indian police hunted down and killed a suspected Kashmiri militant believed to be the mastermind of a 2005 attack on a disputed holy shrine, police said on Saturday.

08/11/2007: Source. Thirteen people were killed and 15 wounded in attacks by rebels in India's Assam state days before the country celebrates its 60th independence anniversary.

08/11/2007: Source. A top militant of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) was shot dead in an encounter with the police on the outskirts of Jammu Saturday.

08/08/2007: Source. Separatist rebels shot dead eight Hindi-speaking migrant workers in India's northeast Assam state on Wednesday.

08/08/2007: Source. Two people were killed and 12 injured in a series of bomb blasts in India's northeastern state of Assam on Wednesday.

08/02/2007: Source. Leftist guerrillas killed two people, including an elderly man, in separate incidents near Raipur.

07/27/2007: Source. Indian police kill at least 8 people in protesters clash. The protest a day earlier in Mudigonda, a small village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, was called by two Indian communist parties as part of a campaign to press the government to give land to the poor.

07/14/2007: Source. A local official kidnapped by rebels in the northeastern Indian state of Assam was found dead Monday.

07/11/2007: Source. Abducted Food Corporation of India (FCI) official P.C. Ram was killed in a gunbattle between security forces and members of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) at Borka Panitema village in Kamrup district of Assam from late Wednesday night to Thursday noon. Two ULFA men were also killed in the encounter with security forces .

07/10/2007: Source. Five Maoists were Tuesday gunned down by police in a gun battle in the forest region of the Western Ghats in Karnataka.

07/09/2007: Source. Maoist militants attacked Chintagufa village in the state's insurgency-hit Bijapur district Friday night and took two farmers to a nearby forest.
The bullet-ridden bodies of the farmers, Kalmu Dulla, 50, and Marwi Mura, 40, were found in the forest Monday.

07/09/2007: Source. An hours-long battle between police and Maoist rebels armed with machine guns and mortars ended with the deaths of 25 rebels and 24 police in a thick forest of Chhattisgarh State in central India.

07/06/2007: Source. Police opened fire on a crowd protesting alleged human rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir yesterday, killing one teenager and wounding a second person.

07/06/2007: Source. Muhammad Sultan s/o Abdul Gaffor r/o Kutch Hall and Muhammad Ashraf s/o Muhammad Ramzan r/o Ranthal were killed by soldiers of 11 Rashtriya Riles to revenge the militant attack in which a soldier sustained injuries.

07/05/2007: Source. A civilian was killed and another wounded in Kashmir on Thursday when an Indian soldier fired at angry villagers who tried to seize him while he was reportedly cuddling with a Muslim girl.

07/05/2007: Source. Two villagers were killed when hundreds of Nagaland residents crossed the border and torched four settlements in Geleki, in Sibsagar district. More than 20 villagers have been injured in the attack.

07/01/2007: Source. Two villagers were beaten to death and another seriously injured on orders issued by a kangaroo court held by Maoist rebels in India's eastern state of Bihar, a news agency reported Monday.

06/30/2007: Source. Naxalites of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) attacked and blew up two police posts and killed nine persons, including seven policemen, in Rohtas district of Bihar on Saturday night.

06/30/2007: Source. Four powerful bombs set off by suspected separatists exploded in crowded markets and outside a Hindu temple in northeast India's Assam state on Saturday, killing five people and wounding more than 70.

06/28/2007: Source. At least seven suspected Muslim militants were killed on Thursday by security forces in India- administered Kashmir as they sought to cross into India while a soldier died in the encounter, officials and reports said. Three militants said to be planning a suicide attack were killed by the police in another gun-battle in the insurgency-torn state.

06/25/2007: Source. In Chhattisgarh, tension prevailed in the southern parts as Maoists allegedly killed two members of a civil militia movement soon after the blockade began at midnight on Monday.

06/25/2007: Source. At least two persons were killed and 11 injured Monday when a grenade lobbed at security forces missed the target and exploded at a bus stand in Jammu and Kashmir's Doda town, about 175 km from here.

06/24/2007: Source. Five unidentified militants were killed and three army personnel injured in the gunbattle at village Beri-Doori near the Line of Control (LoC) in Keran sector on Sunday.

06/23/2007: Source. A bomb blast in the city of Gauhati in northeast India Saturday has killed at least five people and wounded nearly three dozen more.

06/22/2007: Source. Two Maoists were killed Friday in a gun battle with police in Andhra Pradesh's Warangal district.

06/19/2007: Source. Two security personnel were killed and two injured when 20 Maoists attacked a police team on a train in Bihar in Central India.

06/18/2007: Source. A 15 year old boy was killed in a cross fire when an encounter was going on between Indian Troops and LeT militantsin Chewdara area of Beerwah of District Budgam.

06/17/2007: Source. A top rebel leader and two other suspected militants were killed on Monday in a gunbattle with Indian forces in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

06/13/2007: Source. Police killed a rebel and recovered 10 kg (20 lb) of explosives in Guwahati, A main city of Assam.

06/13/2007: Source. Two people were killed and 30 wounded in a powerful bomb blast in a crowded village market in India's restive state of Assam on Wednesday

06/12/2007: Source. Three Indian soldiers and Five suspected Islamic militants were killed in Kashmir.

06/11/2007: Source. In occupied Kashmir, an Indian police personnel and a civilian were killed and a woman was injured in an attack at Mola in Ramban district.

06/10/2007: Source. Indian troops in Kashmir have shot dead three Islamic militants along the de facto border with Pakistan and a further three people have been killed by rebels.

06/10/2007: Source. At least eleven people were killed and six injured in clashes between two rival ethnic separatist groups, Meitei and Kuki , in India's northeastern state of Manipur.

06/07/2007: Source. Maoist have killed a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader in Jharkhand's Simdega district.

06/05/2007: Source. In Maoist attack, two policemen were killed in the eastern state of Bihar after stepping on a landmine while scouring the forest for rebels.

06/05/2007: Source. Landmine blasts, blamed on Maoist rebels, killed at least five people In the central state of Chhattisgarh on Tuesday, soon after the insurgents bombed electricity transmission towers plunging thousands of homes into darkness. At least three workers of the state electricity board were killed when the truck in which they were travelling hit a landmine.
Five policemen were also injured in Tuesday's blast in Narayanpur district in the south of the state, police said.
Last week, landmines planted by Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh killed at least nine police officers.

06/04/2007: Source. At least four suspected Muslim militants were killed Monday by security forces in India.

06/04/2007: Source. Suspected separatist rebels shot dead two ruling party leaders and abducted another politician in India's north-eastern state of Assam, it was reported Tuesday. A police spokesman told the IANS news agency that militants of the banned Dima Halam Daoga (DHD) killed Purnendu Langthasa, head of an autonomous local administrative council and his colleague, Nindu Langthasa in the North Cachar Hills district after a rally for council elections on Monday.

06/03/2007: Source. Suspected rebels ambushed a police vehicle in India's troubled northeast, killing four policemen and injuring two others near Koilapahar, a village 220 miles south of Gauhati, the Assam state capital.

06/02/2007: Source. At least four Maoist militants were shot dead in armed clashes with police in India’s central Chhattisgarh state.
In 2006, 749 people including rebels, security personnel and civilians were killed in Maoist-related violence, while there were over 250 dead in the first four months of 2007.

05/30/2007: Source. At least nine people including a paramilitary soldier have been killed in separate insurgency-related violence in India's northeastern state of Manipur.

05/30/2007: Source. A Bhutanese refugee was killed and 11 injured after Indian police fired on them as they tried to cross the Nepal-India border to return to their homeland.

05/28/2007: Source. Angry villagers blocked highways and railroad lines in northwestern India for a third day Thursday as the death toll from clashes with police rose to 18 after an officer was beaten to death and police shot four protesters.

05/26/2007: Source. A bombing in Guwahati which left seven dead and 30 injured—apparently the work of the separatist United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA).

05/25/2007: Source. Land mines planted by Maoist rebels killed at least nine police officers in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

05/25/2007: Source. Maoist rebels have killed four members of its breakaway group in Lathear district of Jharkhand.
Maoists raided a village and abducted four members of Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC) on Monday night. They were later killed in the jungles of Lather district

05/24/2007: Source. Maoists late Sunday attacked the house of a Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader in West Midnapore district of West Bengal, killing his father-in-law, police said Monday.

05/19/2007: Source. Five Islamic militants and an Indian soldier were killed in gunbattles in Kashmir.
Indian forces are seeking to suppress an Islamic separatist revolt that began in 1989 and has claimed at least 42,000 lives by official count.
Kashmiris frequently voice resentment at the presence of an estimated 500,000 Indian security forces in the region who are battling the militants.

05/18/2007: Source. At least 13 people were killed on Friday when a bomb ripped through a historic mosque in southern India, sparking clashes between angry Muslim worshippers and security forces.
At least two of the 13 deaths were caused by police who fired live ammunition and tear gas at angry crowds protesting against what they said was a lack of police protection,

05/15/2007: Source. Separatist rebels killed six immigrant labourers in coordinated strikes on Tuesday in northeast India's restive Assam state.
These attacks came a day after five people were killed on Sunday (05/13/2007)in ethnic clashes in eastern Assam.
Two people were killed on Monday (05/14/2007)in a bomb blast set off by the rebels at a market in Guwahati, the state's main city.
More than 20 000 people have been killed since the insurgency began in Assam in 1979.

05/13/2007: Source. Five Maoist guerrillas were killed in a shootout after security forces in eastern India raided a rebel hideout.
Meanwhile, in Chhattisgarh Maoist rebels killed a police constable deployed to guard state Public Health Engineering Minister Kedar Kashyap in insurgency hit Bastar district.

03/15/2007: Source. Suspected Maoist rebels stormed a police post in the heavily forested center of India early Thursday morning (03/15/2007), killing nearly 50 officers (some say 54) and their recruits from a village militia.

03/14/2007: Source. Farmers in eastern India angered by government plans to build an industrial park on their land fought police with rocks, machetes and pickaxes, and at least 12 people were killed, 39 people were wounded, including 14 police officers. The incident brought the death toll in Nandigram since violence first erupted there to 19 since January 7.

02/24/2007: Source. Fifteen police officers were killed Saturday when suspected rebels ambushed their patrol in India's remote northeast.

02/19/2007: Source. Two coaches of the Samjhauta Express traveling between India and Pakistan caught fire after twin blasts rocked the railway carriages at around 11:53 P.M. IST (18:23 UTC) on Sunday, February 18, 2007, as the train was passing through the railway station in the village of Diwana near the Indian city of Panipat, Haryana, India. The incident caused death of 68.

01/08/2007: Source. violence erupted in Assam with militants killing four more people, taking the toll in a string of deadly attacks mainly targeting Hindi-speaking migrant workers rising to 66.

01/06/2007: Source. At least 21 lives, including 13 migrant workers shot while they slept and eight government employees killed by a land mine explosion by suspected separatist rebels in Assam state.

01/05/2007: Source. A series of attacks by suspected separatist rebels killed 35 migrants and wounded at least 19 in Assam state's tea-growing districts of Tinsukia and Dibrugarh.
The Naxalites retaliated with Light Mortar Guns and rifles from the top of the hills killing on the spot two policemen.

12/25/2006: Source. At least four Naxalites were reportedly killed in a major offensive planned by police on a naxal-den in remote Gyarabatti area of north Gadchiroli.

11/26/2007: Source. a suspected terrorist bomb explodes on a train in West Bengal State, India. 5 people were killed and more than 25 were injured.

09/08/2006: Source. At least 2 bomb blasts target a Muslim cemetery in the western town of Malegaon. The blasts kill 37 people and leave 125 others wounded. The explosions have come four days before the verdicts are due to be announced for 123 defendants in a trial linked to the 1993 bomb attacks in Bombay that killed 257.

09/04/2006: Source. Indian police shot dead one of the longest surviving militants in Kashmir in an overnight raid on his hideout. Billu Gujjar, 36, a local commander of the rebel group Hizbul Mujahideen was killed on Monday in Udhampur.
On the same day, insurgents killed a soldier who resisted attempts to be forced from his home in Khaipora village. The soldier's brother was also killed.
On 09/05/2007: Source.Suspected militants shot dead 22-year-old Junaidul Haque, a resident of Sopore.
Elsewhere, in Pulwama and Anantnag, troops shot dead three militants late Monday and Tuesday, said police.

08/16/2006: Source. At least five persons were killed and 50 others, incluing five American and three French nationals, injured when a powerful bomb exploded in the complex of International Society for Krishna Consciousness .

07/11/2006: Source. Mumbai train bombings were a series of seven bomb blasts that took place over a period of 11 minutes on the Suburban Railway in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and India's financial capital. 209 people lost their lives and over 700 were injured in the attacks. According to the Indian police the bombings were carried out by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Students Islamic Movement of India.

06/02/2006: Source. Twelve tribal villagers in India were shot dead by police on January 2 during a demonstration against the development of the Kalinga Nagar steel complex in the eastern state of Orissa. A 13-year-old boy and three women were among those killed.

05/31/2006: Source. A land mine believed planted by communist rebels killed 12 officers from a paramilitary police force when officers from the Central Reserve Police Force were heading back to their base in the state of Jharkhand. Maoist rebels were believed to be responsible for explosion.

05/01/2006: Source. Suspected Islamic militants have killed at least 35 Hindus in two separate attacks in Indian-controlled Kashmir. More than 60,000 people have been killed since an armed separatist insurgency began in Kashmir in 1989.

05/01/2006: Source. At least four people were killed and 22 injured Monday in the western Indian city of Vadodara in demonstrations over the demolition of a mausoleum.
In February-March 2003, Gujarat state saw the deaths of 1044 people - mostly Muslims - in sectarian violence, according to official government figures. Unofficial estimates put the death toll at more than 3,000.

04/13/2006: Source. Five people, one a policeman, have been killed in violence in the southern Indian city of Bangalore following the death of legendary film actor Rajkumar.

4 policemen killed in northeast India

2007-06-03T23:46:00.000-07:00

GAUHATI, India — Suspected rebels ambushed a police vehicle in India's troubled northeast, killing four policemen and injuring two others, police said Monday.

Dressed in olive green jungle fatigues, the insurgents attacked the police vehicle on Sunday near Koilapahar, a village 220 miles south of Gauhati, the Assam state capital, said Anurag Tankha, a superintendent of police.

"The injured police officers walked to a nearby police station and informed of the attack by up to 10 tribal militants," Tankha told The Associated Press.

Police suspect the attack to be a joint operation by local tribespeople and the United Liberation Front of Asom.

While the ULFA has been fighting for an independent Assam homeland since 1979, the Karbi Longri North Cachar Hills Liberation Front demands wide autonomy within India for the region inhabited by Karbi and Dimasa tribespeople.

The tribal group had launched a major attack in the area in January and killed five policemen and two civilians.

Monday's attack came as top army, paramilitary and police officers from four insurgency-hit states in India's northeast — Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh — met in Gauhati and discussed steps to jointly fight militancy in the region.

The rebels say Assam's indigenous people, most of whom are ethnically closer to Myanmar and China than to the rest of India, are ignored by the federal government in New Delhi, some 1,000 miles to the west. They also accuse the government of exploiting the northeast's rich natural resources.

Source.

India had US$7.06 billion Deficit on US$10.57 billion Export in April

2007-06-03T05:09:00.000-07:00

In the past April, India exported US$10.57 billion of goods but imported US$17.63 billion.

The trade deficit of US$7.06 billion is almost 70% of India's export. That is really huge.

More details can be found here.

Ridiculous "peace index" created by westerners

2007-06-01T23:03:00.000-07:00

This is the news about the release of the first so-called global peace index.

In my opinion, to judge if a country if peaceful or not, some straightforward index are very valid, at least much better than these trash "experts" suggested.
1. How many countries this country has had wars with?
2. How many countries this country has military presences without authorization from UN?
3. How many civilians this country's military has killed in recent 20 years?

Some information about the so-called peace index can be founf in wiki.

India cops arrest 4,000 Christian marchers

2007-05-31T01:48:00.000-07:00

DELHI, India May 29 -- Police arrested more than 4,000 protestors who were engaged in a peaceful march through the streets of India's capital Tuesday to call for the government to end violence against Christians. The rally, called "Stop Violence On Christians," was organized after two recently televised attacks on Christians and an increase of anti-Christian incidents in 2007, AsiaNews reported Tuesday.

The station house police chief confirmed he had "arrested" approximately 4,000 people at 1:05 pm and released them an hour later.

"This was the first time since November 1997 that such large numbers of Christians have been arrested in the Parliament Street Police Station. It was incredible to see Catholic nuns, Protestant pastors, civil society activists and more singing Christian songs of liberation within the police station," said John Dayal, Secretary General, All India Christian Council, and President, All India Catholic Union.

Organizers expected 2,000 people, but attendance was estimated at 5,000. Speakers demanded human dignity and constitutional rights for the Christian community and other repressed minorities, who face harassment from Hindu fundamentalists and, in many cases, local government officials.

The news came from here.

I post this just want to show that China and India, or generally most of Asia don't welcome Christians in religion. The business and travels are still wecomed.

China's approach to African nations a lesson for the World Bank

2007-05-30T22:49:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Sachs, New York

The China Daily recently ran a front-page story recounting how Paul Wolfowitz used threats and vulgarities to pressure senior World Bank staff.

The newspaper noted that Wolfowitz sounded like a character out of the mafia television show "The Sopranos". At the same time, while the Wolfowitz scandal unfolded, China was playing host to the Africa Development Bank (ADB), which held its board meeting in Shanghai. This is a vivid metaphor for today's world: while the World Bank is caught up in corruption and controversy, China skillfully raises its geopolitical profile in the developing world.

China's rising power is, of course, based heavily on its remarkable economic success. The ADB meeting took place in the Pudong district, Shanghai's most remarkable development site. From largely unused land a generation ago, Pudong has become a booming centre of skyscrapers, luxury hotels, parks, industry, and vast stretches of apartment buildings. Shanghai's overall economy is currently growing at around 13 per cent per year, thus doubling in size every five or six years. Everywhere there are start-ups, innovations, and young entrepreneurs hungry for profits.

I had the chance to participate in high-level meetings between Chinese and African officials at the ADB meetings. The advice that the African leaders received from their Chinese counterparts was sound, and much more practical than they typically get from the World Bank.

Chinese officials stressed the crucial role of public investments, especially in agriculture and infrastructure, to lay the basis for private-sector-led growth. In a hungry and poor rural economy, as China was in the 1970s and as most of Africa is today, a key starting point is to raise farm productivity. Peasant farmers need the benefits of fertiliser, irrigation, and high-yield seeds, all of which were a core part of China's economic takeoff.

Two other critical investments are also needed: roads and electricity, without which there cannot be a modern economy. Farmers might be able to increase their output, but it won't be able to reach the cities, and the cities won't be able to provide the countryside with inputs. The officials stressed how the government has taken pains to ensure that the power grid and transportation network reaches every village in China.

Of course, the African leaders were most appreciative of the next message: China is prepared to help Africa in substantial ways in agriculture, roads, power, health, and education. And the African leaders already know that this is not an empty boast.

All over Africa, China is financing and constructing basic infrastructure. During the meeting, the Chinese leaders emphasised their readiness to support agricultural research as well. They described new high-yield rice varieties, which they are prepared to share with their African counterparts.

All of this illustrates what is wrong with the World Bank, even aside from Wolfowitz's failed leadership. Unlike the Chinese, the Bank has too often forgotten the most basic lessons of development, preferring to lecture the poor and force them to privatise basic infrastructure, rather than to help the poor to invest in infrastructure and other crucial sectors.

The Bank's failures began in the early 1980s, when, under the ideological sway of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it tried to get Africa and other poor regions to cut back or close down government investments and services. For 25 years, the Bank tried to get governments out of agriculture, leaving impoverished peasants to fend for themselves. The result has been a disaster in Africa, with farm productivity stagnant for decades. The Bank also pushed for privatisation of national health systems, water utilities, and road and power networks, and grossly under-financed these critical sectors.

This extreme free-market ideology, also called "structural adjustment", went against the practical lessons of development successes in China and the rest of Asia. Practical development strategy recognises that public investments - in agriculture, health, education, and infrastructure - are necessary complements to private investments. The World Bank has instead wrongly seen such vital public investments as an enemy of private-sector development.

Whenever the Bank's extreme free-market ideology failed, it has blamed the poor for corruption, mismanagement, or lack of initiative. This was Wolfowitz's approach, too. Instead of focusing the Bank's attention on helping the poorest countries to improve their infrastructure, he launched a crusade against corruption. Ironically, of course, his stance became untenable when his own misdeeds came to light.

The Bank can regain its relevance only if it becomes practical once again, by returning its focus to financing public investments in priority sectors, just as the Chinese leadership is prepared to do.

The good news is that African governments are getting the message on how to spur economic growth, and are also getting crucial help from China and other partners that are less wedded to extreme free-market ideology than the World Bank.

Many African governments at the Shanghai meeting declared their intention to act boldly, by investing in infrastructure, agricultural modernisation, public health, and education.

The Wolfowitz debacle should be a wake-up call to the World Bank: it must no longer be controlled by ideology. If that happens, the Bank can still do justice to the bold vision of a world of shared prosperity that prompted its creation after World War II.

Jeffrey Sachs is a professor of economics and the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Source: http://nationmultimedia.com/2007/05/25/opinion/opinion_30035104.php

This could be a direct answer to those who said or believe that China is colonizing Africa. Those people never understand why African countries is collectively, happily to shake hands with China after they had got "assistants" from western countries.

Indian police fire on Bhutanese refugees

2007-05-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

A Bhutanese refugee was killed and 11 injured after Indian police fired on them as they tried to cross the Nepal-India border to return to their homeland.
Mr Poudel says at least 11 others were injured in the shooting at the Mechi bridge.

Indian officials blamed the gathering of 7,000 refugees trying to cross the border for provoking the police action.

More detail, please visit: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200705/s1937032.htm

Army deployed after deadly riots in India

2007-05-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

The army has been deployed in India's Rajasthan state after 14 people were killed in violent clashes over the government's affirmative action plans.

Police fired on protesters from the nomadic Gujjar tribe who had blocked a key highway near Delhi on Tuesday.

At least two of those killed are believed to be policemen.

The BBC's Narayan Bareth in the state capital, Jaipur, says that there have been reports of protests by Gujjars spreading to other parts of the state.

In a separate incident, a mob cut off the hands of one policeman and the leg of another, according to Rajasthan interior minister Gulab Chand Kataria.

A Gujjar community leader, Avinash Badana, told India's state-run Doordarshan channel that the police had fired on "unarmed people".

The Gujjars are a large and politically-influential nomadic tribe spread across north India.

The issue of affirmative action is a sensitive one in India

They are demanding that they be categorised as an official tribe so that they may benefit from affirmative action quotas which will give them access to government jobs as well as places in state-supported schools and colleges.

The issue of affirmative action is a sensitive one in India, with many poor communities arguing that it is the only way millions of under-privileged people can benefit from India's economic boom.

But those opposed to it say it is a cynical move by politicians to gain more votes from politically influential communities who make up a large percentage of the country's population.

More detail can be found on BBC website.

Shanghai builds China's biggest container ship

2007-05-29T04:45:00.000-07:00

Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of China Shipbuilding Group Corporation, built a container ship capable of carrying 8,530 20-foot containers, making China the fourth country in the world capable of creating such container ships after South Korea, Japan and Denmark.

With a loading capacity of 101,000 tons, the 334-meter-long ship only needs one helmsman and is equipped with four electricity generators.

It is one of the five 8,530-TEU-ships the company is building for China Shipping Container Lines Co. Ltd. The company will also build four such ships for Greek shipping company Costamare.

Source: Shanghai Daily:

Chinese ports' cargo handling capacity to reach 8 billion tonnes by 2010

2007-05-29T04:43:00.000-07:00

Mumbai: The cargo handling capacity of China's ports is expected to reach eight billion tonnes and 170 million TEUs in 2010 amidst a trade boom and continued economic expansion.

The combined cargo handling capacity of China's ports totalled 5.6 billion tonnes and 93 million TEUs (twenty-foot container equivalent units) last year, the largest in the world for four consecutive years, the head of China Communication and Transportation Association, Qian Yongchang, said.

China had 12 ports with throughput capacities exceeding 100 million tonnes last year. Shanghai port handled 530 million tonnes of cargo last year, making it the busiest in the world.

China had been investing heavily in port construction as the national economy soars and foreign trade increases steadily. In 2006, more than 160 construction projects kicked off on China's seaports, involving 60 billion yuan, up 30 per cent year-on-year.

China's exports reached $252.1 billion, up 27.8 per cent, while imports were valued at $205.7 billion, up 18.2 per cent, figures from Chinese customs showed.

The priority of the investment in port construction would be on expanding capacity and improving comprehensive services, Mr Qian said.

China is expected to replace Germany as the world's second largest trader this year with $2.1 trillion in foreign trade and may overtake the US to become the world's largest trader by the end of the decade. China's foreign trade in the first three months totalled $457.7 billion, up 23.3 per cent year-on-year.

Source: http://www.domain-b.com/industry/shipping/20070523_capacity.htm