A municipal government in southwestern China has suspended at least temporarily the construction of a metals factory after bloody street protests on Monday, in the latest sign of the growing strength of the country’s environmental movement.
Government and Communist Party officials in China have been pounding down so much Moutai grain alcohol — the good stuff, the expensive stuff, not the everyday rotgut — that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao recently proposed slashing the state budget for it. It was a thoroughly shocking idea, like kicking lobbyists out of the halls of Congress or banning train strikes in France.
Making waves today in China — at least in media circles — is an editorial on the Shi Junrong case written by journalist Cao Lin (曹林) in China Youth Daily, a newspaper published by the Chinese Communist Youth League with a longstanding reputation for solid journalism against the odds. The paper has given us top journalists like CMP fellows Li Datong, He Yanguang, Lu Yuegang and Liu Chang, to mention just a few.
Not a trace of the July 1 Hong Kong protests can be seen on mainland Chinese media, and “sensitive words” surrounding the rallies have been scrubbed from major Web platforms. So Global Times Chief Editor Hu Xijin’s Weibo post addressing, in English, “protest” in “ongKong” got the surround-and-watch treatment:
With a population of more than 1.3 billion people, can there really be such thing as a single “voice of China”? According to the Chinese government, the answer is, without question, yes. Not only does there exist a “China's voice” or a “Chinese voice,” this voice is becoming stronger and stronger on the international stage.
China faces a pension crisis as its population ages, and that prospect is starting to alarm Chinese workers who are already struggling to pay for education, healthcare and housing. By the time those people who joined the workforce in the 1980s retire, there will be two workers for every retiree, compared to the current ratio of 6:1, according to Guangdong census last year.
The China-based unit of Hong Kong computer monitor maker Proview has found itself $60 million richer after concluding settlement negotiations in its legal dispute with Apple over the use of the iPad name in China. Proview isn’t faring nearly so well in the court of public opinion, however.
What a difference four years can make—for a blog, a country, and a planet. (“Blog, country, planet” might have made a nice coat of arms if we’d thought of it…) When China Beat launched early in 2008, blogs seemed like relatively new kids on the block, at least to academics. Four years later, the genre is old hat, sharing a landscape with newcomers like Tumblr, Twitter, and other microblogging platforms, and we’re increasingly catching up on China news not on computers but on devices that fit in our palms.
“I started to think about this book in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics,” says Chan Koonchung of his dystopian novel Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 (The Fat Years). “2008 was the beginning of a new chapter for China, which is when I realized I had a story: the quake in Sichuan, the Olympic torch, the market crash, the Olympics, the meltdown in the West … It was a very eventful time,” he says. His novel takes the reader just beyond the present time, fast-forwarding to 2013 and to a China that has encountered no obstacles to its formidable economic growth.
On April 22, Wang Xiangwei, the new editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, informed me that my contract with the newspaper would not be renewed when it expired on May 21. I can’t say I was surprised.
