| Ai Weiwei: I “Morally” Won Posted: 20 Jul 2012 11:31 PM PDT Ai Weiwei may have lost his appeal of a multimillion-dollar tax evasion fine, but he tried to look at the glass as half-full when speaking to the Daily Beast's Dan Levin on Friday: Speaking by phone, Ai said the ruling will ultimately come back to haunt the authorities. "I feel sad for them," he said. "Young people know what is happening. We morally won the case anyway, and I'm very aware the government really feels paralyzed." Ai said he plans to move forward with more legal tactics to show the world how the government makes a mockery of China's judicial system. As for his fate, Ai didn't sound too optimistic. "Maybe I have no future," he said. "I just have to deal with what's happening now."
Today, award-winning filmmaker Alison Klayman's documentary about Ai debuted in New York. The New York Times calls Klayman's film, Ai Weiwiei: Never Sorry, a "classic case of being in the right place at the right time": "One of the hard parts of making a film like this is that you don't know how the story ends," said Evan Osnos, the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, who met Ms. Klayman just before she started the project. "If you're making a film about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, you do know, and you structure the story accordingly. But if you're making a film in real time about a guy who is going down an uncharted path, all you can do is hang on for dear life and see where it goes. To Alison's credit she stayed with it, because she saw a story of real importance." Ms. Klayman said that among her objectives was to use Mr. Ai's situation to show that not only are there "people interested in pushing the boundaries in China," but also that "there are cracks for those people to maneuver in." Citing his use of Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media to get his political message and artworks out, she added, "I do see China as a society with room for a lot of interesting things to be happening, despite the tough nature of authority." But she also captures the Chinese state at its most arbitrary and despotic, disregarding the rule of law and international human rights conventions to which it is a signatory. Officials in Shanghai, for example, invite Mr. Ai to build a studio there, then bulldoze it when he falls into disfavor: he responds with a party at the demolition site, serving river crab, whose name is a Mandarin homonym for the "harmony" the government tries to enforce.
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Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, dissidents
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| Photo: Charging Coal, by LHOON Posted: 20 Jul 2012 02:32 PM PDT |
| Xinhua Dictionary Reflects Social Change Posted: 20 Jul 2012 02:52 PM PDT With over 400 million copies printed since its first edition was issued in 1953, The Xinhua Dictionary (新华字典, literally "New China Dictionary") is mainland China's authoritative lexicon and the world's most popular reference work. China Daily reports on the 11th edition, released earlier this month, and how its contents have been modified to reflect society. While a surplus of newly-coined terms can now be found in its pages, many sensitive words have also disappeared, displaying the social and political spirit of of the times: The latest edition, unveiled Monday after eight years of compilation, "unprecedentedly" increased its content by about one third, "highlighting social changes over the past decade," he said. "Nu" or "slave" is also added with a new meaning in words such as "Fang Nu", or "house slave," referring to people striving to earn money in order to buy an apartment at a time when housing prices soar. The case is the same with words such as "car slaves" and "credit-card slaves." "The inclusion of these various types of 'slaves' in the dictionary shows that these new disadvantaged social groups have garnered great attention," Zhou said. [...]The dictionary's 10th edition, published eight years ago, already deleted a few of such terms that contradicted social norms and other pervasive concepts. "In this new edition, we've deleted all improper content," Zhou said.
The 3,000 new words come from slang spoken on the streets of China, and from the collection of Internet terms that swells along with China's ever-growing netizen population (which reportedly just hit 538 million). The Telegraph's Malcolm Moore explains a few more of the newly added terms, and why some have recently disappeared: [...O]ne word to fall out of the dictionary, as China jettisons its colonial past, was Baixiangren, literally "white-faced person", an old Shanghainese term for a rich layabout, or playboy. "The words have to be current, widely used by the masses, and likely to be around for a long time, but there are no specific rules for inclusion," said an editor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the compilers of the volume, who declined to be named.
In a piece for Foreign Policy, Eveline Chao explains the social significance of some of these new additions: So what does the new edition, compiled over seven years and featuring more than 3,000 new words and expressions, include? Many of the new entries are deeply vernacular, originating from Internet memes, tabloid scandals, and other informal sources. Some, like boke [博客](blog), and tuangou [团购] (online group shopping, along the lines of Groupon) reflect today's new, digital world. Others, like fenqing [愤青] (nationalists, literally "angry youth") and xiangjiao ren [香蕉人] (banana person, which usually refers to Chinese-Americans — yellow on the outside, white on the inside — though unlike in the United States this is not pejorative), are names for new social categories and subcultures that have emerged. The seven words below offer insights into the movements and preoccupations of today's China.[...]
Other new entries that made it onto Foreign Policy's list reflect topics long covered by CDT: fangnu (房奴), those "house slaves" bound to their mortgages; PM 2.5, an addition that speaks to a growing concern about the environment; NBA, reflecting China's obsession with the American basketball league; and zhainan/nv (宅男/女), describing China's "Internet freaks". For more on China's linguistic zeitgeist, browse CDT's entire Grass Mud Horse Lexicon, or see our Sensitive Words series.
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| China’s Per Capita Carbon Emissions Match EU’s Posted: 20 Jul 2012 02:14 PM PDT According to a new report (.pdf) by the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China's per capita carbon emissions have reached a similar level to the EU's. Global total emissions continue to rise, with the balance increasingly shifting from developed to developing countries. From PBL: Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) increased by 3% last year, reaching an all-time high of 34 billion tonnes in 2011. In China, average per capita CO2 emissions increased by 9% to 7.2 tonnes CO2. This is similar to per capita emissions in the European Union. In comparison, in 2011, the United States was still one of the largest emitters of CO2, with 17.3 tonnes in per capita emissions. […] The increase in China's CO2 emissions was mainly due to a continued high economic growth rate, with related increases in fossil fuel consumption. This increase in fuel consumption in 2011 was mainly driven by the increase in building construction and expansion of infrastructure, as indicated by the growth in cement and steel production. Domestic coal consumption grew by 9.7% and coal import increased by 10%, making China the world's largest coal importer, overtaking Japan.
The data are subject to several caveats, however, as The Guardian's Duncan Clark reports. For example, the figures count emissions from a product's manufacture against Chinese workers rather than European consumers. The figures published on Wednesday – like most official data on carbon emissions – are based on where fossil fuels are burned. A recent UK select committee report argued that it was also important to consider the import and export of goods when considering national responsibility for climate change. This would affect today's data, because previous studies have suggested that almost a fifth of Chinese emissions are caused by the production of goods for export. In addition, the new county data exclude international travel, which accounts for 3% of the global total and is likely to be heavily weighted towards richer countries. Non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also excluded. […] But a recent study showed that even when imports and international travel are taken into account, the developed world now accounts for less than half of current global emissions. Moreover, China's emissions may be even higher than reported today according to another study showing that the country's official energy statistics were as much as 20% lower than they should be.
Sam Geall commented at chinadialogue: For some commentators …, these new findings … call into question China's claim to speak for developing countries in international climate diplomacy. The lead paragraph in Nature's story summarises this point: "For years China has dismissed concerns about its rising carbon emissions by pointing out that, on a per-capita basis, Chinese citizens still emit far less than their counterparts in the industrialized world. But now that China's per-capita emissions are on par with those of the European Union, that argument will be much harder to make."
However, climate equity isn't only about parity between nations, but also between people and social groups within nations. One journalist tweeted me to point out that the statistics misrepresented the average person in China, given vast disparities in wealth across the country. She has a point. A nomad on the Mongolian steppe certainly has a vastly different carbon footprint from the driver of a gas-guzzler – or "oil tiger" – in Shanghai. If it is misleading to look at countries' emissions in terms of total volume, isn't it also a mistake to only look at per capita emissions?
Much of the rise in China's emissions comes from an increase in coal burning to power the country's economic growth. Surging coal use now shows some signs of tailing off: the formidable growth in imports cited by PBL has slowed to a projected 8.4% this year, the lowest since 2008. This, together with corresponding drops in electrical output growth, has helped fuel fears of a sharp economic slowdown: vice premier Li Keqiang famously places more trust in these figures than in official GDP as measures of economic health. At Caixin, however, Yu Hairong suggests other explanations: "an easing, evolving" and less carbon-intensive Chinese economy, and a shift to alternative power sources. For years, China's industrial structure has been heavily reliant on power-hungry businesses including steelmaking, non-ferrous metal and chemicals production, and construction materials manufacturing. Strong growth in each of these sectors factored into soaring power consumption over the past decade, said Zhang Long, chief electricity analyst at Essence Securities. But now, China's economy is shifting toward service-sector growth and away from heavy industry expansion. For that reason, non-residential demand for electricity has grown much faster in the service sector than in manufacturing, steelmaking, cement production and the like. […] Change is also affecting the power industry's supply structure thanks to, for example, heavier use of hydroelectric plants. NEA expects an increased emphasis on hydropower and other non-coal sources of electricity to reduce power plant demand for coal by about 8 million tons this year. Indeed, coal-fired power plant generating capacity fell 1.5 percent in May from the same month 2011. Meanwhile, nationwide hydropower generating capacity grew 31 percent in May over the same period 2011 and 52 percent over April's level.
chinadialogue recently posted an overview of the fierce debate over hydropower expansion (via CDT), with proponents insisting that China's rivers remain underexploited and critics arguing that they already "can hardly breathe" under the weight of existing dams. Two more recent posts at the site examine the prospects for other coal alternatives. One is natural gas. The PBL report cites a modest shift towards gas from other fossil fuels as a factor in declining US carbon emissions. Although still made of crushed plankton and regarded as a short-term solution at best by environmentalists, it does burn more cleanly than coal or oil in terms of both carbon and particulate matter. This makes it an attractive alternative for cities like Beijing, but as An Geng and Xu Nan explain, natural gas adoption elsewhere will be hindered by cost and supply issues. On March 3, the Beijing Development and Reform Commission (BDRC) announced a new round of targets to cut coal use, with the aim of improving air quality and reducing PM2.5 levels. The city's plan is to cap coal use at 15 million tonnes a year by 2015, the end of the 12th Five-Year Plan period. Now, it has said it will extend and deepen this cap, cutting use to 10 million tonnes by 2020, which represents a 60% drop on 2010 figures. Natural gas is a core part of the strategy to wean the city off coal. Under plans released in 2010, Beijing's four remaining coal-burning power plants are due to switch over to natural-gas combined heat and power (CHP) systems by the winter of 2014 at the latest. Despite concerns about cost and supply, Beijing has pulled out the policy stops to drive through the switch, and looks set to be the first Chinese city to consign coal power to the history books. But that does not mean it will be easy for others, without the clout of the capital, to follow suit. […] Beijing isn't the only city looking to gas. Shanghai also has a good number of natural gas power plants, and Chongqing is trying to subsidise a switch over from coal. For the rest of China's cities, Beijing's policies may look like an easy route to bluer skies. But, away from the centre of government, the pro-gas lobby may have a harder time getting its way.
Also at chinadialogue, Cui Zheng discusses nuclear energy's possible resurgence following the publication of a new safety plan. The public opinion fallout from the Fukushima disaster, combined with a rising tide of environmental protests, may dissuade authorities from allowing a potentially destabilising revival ahead of this year's leadership transition. Since the days following Japan's nuclear disaster in March last year, the number of countries to halt construction or operation of nuclear-power plants has grown, while the global nuclear industry has pinned its hopes on China coming back into the fray. Is it the case, then, as many believe, that construction will soon restart in China? The launch of the new safety strategy has certainly had an impact on the industry. Four days after the plan was approved, investors pumped 400 million yuan (US$63 million) of funding into the Pengze nuclear plant in south-east China's Jiangxi province, on which work stopped 15 months ago. CNNC Nuclear Power, a China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) subsidiary, passed a pre-listing environmental audit. Market analysts, meanwhile, have started recommending the purchase of nuclear shares. […] But at a State Council meeting on May 31, only the safety plan was passed. There was no sign of the development plan. One expert close to the nuclear policymaking process, who asked to remain anonymous, said it may still be some time before China sees its much touted nuclear spring. "For the sake of stability, nuclear construction is unlikely to get started soon," the source said.
Still, China's beleaguered nuclear industry may have other avenues to explore. According to The Guardian, talks are underway for the £35 billion construction of up to five power stations in the UK.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: carbon emissions, carbon footprint, coal burning, coal imports, EU, european union, hydroelectric power, natural gas, netherlands, nuclear power, United States
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| Rock in China: An Insider’s Journey Posted: 20 Jul 2012 11:08 AM PDT Over the past 30 years, many a foreigner has headed into the middle kingdom to find fortune in the brisk economy of a rapidly changing nation. When Jonathan Campbell went to China over a decade ago, he was searching for the sounds that describe an era. While many of his peers were huddled around business banquets pulling and piling guanxi, Jonathan was getting up-close and personal with China's young but dynamic yaogun (摇滚), or rock-and-roll scene. After publishing Red Rock: the Long Strange March of Chinese Rock and Roll last year, Jonathan has become China's unofficial rock-and-roll ambassador to the English speaking world. In February, Book Club in a Box interviewed Jonathan about his time in China and relationship with its contemporary music scene: Jonathan Campbell: Before I arrived in Beijing, in 2000, I had played with some bands, but my music career, as it were, really began in China. Upon arrival in Beijing, I quickly joined a band and was out seeing gigs, meeting people, and figuring out what was going on. I worked at a couple of local events magazines where it was my job to know what was happening and who was involved. Then I was freelance writing for international publications, and that combination led to a lot of work putting together and promoting gigs and tours for visiting musicians. Though it took a while for me to be able to say it, I became more of a promoter than a writer, though I never stopped writing completely. [...]I got interested by seeing gigs and playing gigs, and being blown away by (some of) what I saw. The first gig I saw was an amazing acoustic group, the Wild Children (video here), and in addition to loving what I heard, I got to talking with the guys in the band, and we became friendly. That would happen over and over again until I realized I was part of the scene.
Jonathan recently told The Wall Street Journal's Jason Chow how China's rock music carries the sub-cultural sound of hope that may have faded from its sonic counterparts in the West, and compiled a list of six albums to demonstrate his point: The jaded Western music establishment can learn a thing or two from China, Jonathan Campbell says. The 37-year-old, who spent four years in Beijing as a band promoter, documents the relatively brief history of Chinese rock in his book "Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll." "The best of Chinese rock music embodies something that isn't embodied in this part of the world anymore—hope, energy and survival," says Mr. Campbell, who now lives in Toronto. "Rock did change the lives of a lot of people, and Chinese rock demonstrates that."
Click through to hear the many shades of sound that make up China's rock scene. Also see Jonathan's Yaogun 101: A Chinese Rock Primer. For more on rock music in China, see Rock 'n Roll With Chinese Characteristics or Cui Jian: Still Rocking, via CDT. For more on musical diplomacy, see Building US-China Relations by Banjo, also via CDT.
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| Q&A: Chen Kaige on the Future of Chinese Film Posted: 20 Jul 2012 11:01 AM PDT China Real Time talks to Chen Kaige, the "Fifth Generation" director of Yellow Earth and Farewell My Concubine, about censorship, Hollywood, and his latest film, Sacrifice, which arrives in the US this month. I'm not so sure [Sacrifice will] work for American audiences. So why did I pick this project? With the great progress China has made in the last three decades, we're sort of proud of what we did, but there is another side. Look at Beijing—I grew up here, but now I come here and am a stranger. I don't want to identify myself as someone who is from Beijing and to me it's a shame, really a shame. They give you a new Beijing and let the old one die. I totally disagree with this, because the soul of the city is gone with the physical stuff. We pay very little attention to what we respect and what we loved in the past with our culture. So that's why I want to pick up this project to tell people who we used to be in our past. […] I enjoy watching films like "Avatar," because I believe it's like a dream, a dream that will take you to another planet. But you can know from it the American spirit. So what's the Chinese spirit? Why in the last decade has everything changed so much? Why do people feel like there's a chance to have a new hope? What can we do to help people have a dream? That's very important for us to say.
Click through for video highlights from the interview. Also at The Wall Street Journal, Laurie Burkitt reported on Thursday how China's booming box office—whose takings have risen by 42% in the last year—is increasingly dominated by foreign films, despite restrictions on their distribution.
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Post tags: Beijing, Chen Kaige, cinema, fifth generation directors, hollywood
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| The Daily Twit – 7/20/12: SAFE Bails Out GM, iPad Launches, and New Oriental Fires Back Posted: 20 Jul 2012 06:17 AM PDT I've got nothing pithy, no huge China news, and no made-up narrative with which I can shoehorn some of these links. It's a haphazard, scattershot Friday. Enjoy your weekend and catch up on your reading. Economist: Violence against doctors: Heartless attacks — Not a breaking news story, but good reporting on an ongoing recent problem that has received a great deal of attention in China. The Economist also has a story about general health care reform in China which is definitely worth reading. Financial Times: China to buy US assets via GM pension — This is a couple days old, but I found it rather fascinating. China's forex authority is buying up positions held by GM's pension fund in some private equity funds. That's all I wanted to say, that China is bailing out GM. Funky. Wall Street Journal: As China Growth Slows: Suddenly, It's the Society, Stupid – Russell Moses talks about how the Party/government plans to handle social unrest in the face of a slowing economy. CNET: iPad makes quiet debut in China — Whether it was the online reservation system or lack of demand, there was no riot at the Apple store in Beijing today. Caixin: New Oriental Fires Back at Short-Seller — Apparently Muddy Waters got the attention of New Oriental. I guess that happens when your stock goes in the toilet, at least temporarily. Foreign Policy: From House Slaves to Banana People — Eveline Chao with another look at Chinese dictionary updates (i.e. new words) New York Times: A Beijing Family's Holiday From Pollution — Didi Kirsten Tatlow with a somewhat painful family discussion about Beijing's pollution. China Daily: China Pharm loses bid to toss vitamin C case — Looks like this price fixing case in New York federal court is going the distance. From this brief report, it sounds like China Pharm filed a motion to dismiss, and the judge wasn't buying any. Latest Sinica Podcast: Attack of the Piranhas — Economic growth, killer fish and ASEAN are among the topics. Now On Line: 'China and Democracy' Debate With Minxin Pei and Eric Li — Jim Fallows with a link to the debate that has generated a lot of discussion within the China expat Twittersphere.
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| China’s Health Care Workers and Smoking Posted: 20 Jul 2012 03:07 AM PDT  Everyone knows that China has a huge problem with smoking, and I would guess that many of my readers already know, from first-hand experience, that the health care profession and hospitals are not immune. Nevertheless, it's always interesting to see some numbers (courtesty of Caixin):
Although 40 percent of male health workers smoked in 2010, the figure represented a decrease from previous years. Around 56 percent of male health care workers were smokers in 1984, 60 percent in 1996 and 57 percent in 2002. China is the largest tobacco producer and consumer in the world. In 2011, China had 300 million smokers and 1 million people died of diseases linked to the habit, according to a report issued by Ministry of Health on May 30. [Tobacco expert] Wang added many physicians maintain a culture which condones smoking. For example, some receive cigarettes as gifts from patients. Doctors also smoke in public places, offices and meeting rooms. Wang said 7 percent of doctors regularly smoked in front of patients. Many medical workers are also grossly misinformed about tobacco and its effects, said Wang. In some instances, medical workers not only deny the hazards of tobacco use to health, but believe it is beneficial. Wang said some medical workers believe people who stop smoking will suffer from lung cancer.
Headline number here is 40%. I'm not sure whether that is higher or lower than my expectations. Either way, it's still way too high. After reading that statistic, I wondered what the comparable numbers were in other countries. Since it's Friday, and I'm way too lazy to do thorough research, I jumped on the first stats I could find, which were quite old. From the U.S. CDC in 1993: Preliminary data indicate that a maximum of 10% of physicians smoke in Australia, Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States; in contrast, at least 40% of physicians in France, Italy, Japan, Spain, and Turkey are smokers.
Interesting. That would compare to about 60% in China at that time, although since China is a developing country, I'm not sure that would be a fair comparison. I assume that the current data for Western Europe and Japan are much lower than was the case in '93. I also came across an interesting 2003 study in Ecuador, which found that over 30% of physicians were smokers. This was apparently higher than anywhere else in Latin America at the time, yet still much lower than the comparable China stat. I'm sure there's lots of other data out there Mr. Google could tell us about, but I suspect that the general conclusion that China's smoking problem is much higher than many other parts of the world holds up. But that 40% figure is not the item that bothered me the most. I'm even more troubled that: 1) so many hospitals out there are still allowing smoking on the premises; and 2) that education on this issue is still so backward. Even if one physician out there believes that smoking is efficacious or that stopping will lead to cancer, well, that represents some sort of institutional failure for medical education. Yikes. It takes a long time for attitudes to change, but we know from the experience of other countries that government action can be very effective in reducing smoking. Hint hint, government. Health care workers are a good place to start. I can't imagine the signal it sends to young people when they see their doctor smoking.
© Stan for China Hearsay, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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| Second Blind Activist Freed From Chinese Custody Posted: 20 Jul 2012 02:18 AM PDT Reuters is reporting that blind activist Li Guizhi, who had been in Chinese custody since attempting to enter Hong Kong to participate in the July 1st pro-democracy protests, has escaped: Li had been petitioning authorities for years to investigate the death of her son, who died suddenly in 2006 and was quickly cremated, Liu said. She never saw her son's dead body. She had wanted to enter Hong Kong to petition her cause at a march held to mark the anniversary of Britain's 1997 handover of the territory back to China, Liu added. Li was subsequently held in a hotel room in Hebei province in northeast China weeks later and, when her guards were dozing, the relatives sneaked her out of the building, Liu Weiping, a spokesman for the alliance, said late on Thursday. "On July 17, at around 5:00 a.m., she managed to escape her hotel room with help from her relatives. They (police) are now pressuring her family to hand her over," Liu said.
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, detention, dissidents, Hong Kong, Li Guizhi
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