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• Zhejiang enterprises reporting figures worse than 2008 crisis
• China's "Human flesh search" film renews discussion of internet vigilantism
• 63-yr old Beijing torchbearer cycles to London
• China to tighten security ahead of Party congress
• China's economy expected to pick up in H2
• Hon Hai's cloud technology center to break ground in August
• TSMC silent on report of talks to acquire Fujitsu chip plant
• Taiwantrade to launch new e-commerce service
• Chinese e-commerce to wage unprecedented price war in second half
• The Bo Xilais: China's Lord and Lady Macbeth | Observer profile
• Beijing's champion investors flock to London
• Electronics industries in East Asia embrace vertical integration
• Japan considers using force to protect controversial Senkaku islands
• After Qidong Protests, China Cancels Waste Project
• Pawn or Deft Operator: 2 Sides Seen in China Suspect
• China Wins Two Gold Medals in Swimming
• China Court Dismisses Ni Yulan’s Fraud Conviction
• Chinese enterprises move abroad to cut costs
• Chinese man chooses wife over mother in boating accident
• Slack domestic demand causes shares of Chinese companies to drop

Zhejiang enterprises reporting figures worse than 2008 crisis Posted: 29 Jul 2012 05:24 AM PDT A study publicized at the standing committee of Zhejiang People's Congress shows that in the first half of 2012, of the 3,998 established industrial enterprises in Wenzhou, 140 have suspended operatio...

China's "Human flesh search" film renews discussion of internet vigilantism Posted: 29 Jul 2012 05:08 AM PDT Award-winning director Chen Kaige's latest film "Caught in the Web" has drawn fresh attention to issues regarding privacy infringement and internet-based vigilantism. The film took in 147 million yua...

63-yr old Beijing torchbearer cycles to London Posted: 29 Jul 2012 05:08 AM PDT People from all over the world are converging on London to see the Olympics by bus, train, plane, boat, and...bike? Leave it to a 63-year-old Chinese grandmother to cycle all the way to the Olympics,...

China to tighten security ahead of Party congress Posted: 29 Jul 2012 04:48 AM PDT China will "tamper down and consolidate" a security belt in Beijing before the city hosts a crucial Communist Party of China congress during which a new generation of leaders will be elected. The Min...

China's economy expected to pick up in H2 Posted: 29 Jul 2012 04:48 AM PDT China's economic growth has bottomed out and will pick up in the second half of this year with government monetary and fiscal support as well as improvements in the world economy, experts said. There...

Hon Hai's cloud technology center to break ground in August Posted: 29 Jul 2012 04:20 AM PDT A cloud technology development center of Hon Hai Precision Industry, the world's largest contract electronics maker, is scheduled to break ground in southern Taiwan in mid-August, an economics officia...

TSMC silent on report of talks to acquire Fujitsu chip plant Posted: 29 Jul 2012 04:20 AM PDT Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing declined to comment Friday on reports that it is in talks to acquire a chip plant from Japan-based Fujitsu Semiconductor. Japan's business daily Nikkei reported th...

Taiwantrade to launch new e-commerce service Posted: 29 Jul 2012 04:20 AM PDT The government's e-trading hub Taiwantrade will launch a new e-commerce service in September to expand the online markets for Taiwanese businesses, Taiwan External Trade Development Council said Frida...

Chinese e-commerce to wage unprecedented price war in second half Posted: 29 Jul 2012 04:20 AM PDT Fast delivery and quality protection has induced more and more people to turn to online "shopping malls" and shun smaller websites. Enfodesk, a think tank, reports that in the second quarter this year...

The Bo Xilais: China's Lord and Lady Macbeth | Observer profile Posted: 28 Jul 2012 04:04 PM PDT They thought they were untouchable, but were brought crashing down by their overarching ambition and the death of a British businessman. Now she's been charged with his murder Top-level Chinese politics does not favour individualism. Long gone are the days when Mao wallowed in a personality cult, when Deng Xiaoping took Margaret Thatcher aback with his liberal use of the spittoon or when his successor, Jiang Zemin, sang a karaoke version of Love Me Tender at a Pacific summit. Today's leaders present a uniform front with their full heads of jet-black hair and business suits (they are all men). They move in lock-step and act against anybody who gets out of line. That made Bo Xilai, the shooting star in China's political firmament, a man apart. He used populist policies to try to make his way to the Politburo Standing Committee, China's supreme seat of power, which will be selected when the Communist party holds its five-yearly congress later this year. At the same time, he harked back to what was depicted as a simpler, purer China, in which contented citizens sang patriotic songs and were looked after by an all-wise Great Helmsman. In his fiefdom in the vast metropolis of Chongqing in south-western China, Bo arranged rallies to sing "red songs" and put up an eight-storey statue of Mao. He travelled to Beijing to lead a celebration of traditional communist values, the centre of attention wherever he went. His wife, Gu Kailai, was just as strong an individual, pursuing a successful career as a lawyer in which she won a high-profile case in the United States. Though her law firm closed as her husband rose to ever-greater prominence, there are well-founded reports that operations continued as normal through front companies that were essential to doing business in fast-expanding Chongqing, a region the size of Austria with a population of 32 million and the spearhead of an ambitious programme to develop south-western China. The family trio was completed by their son, Bo Guagua, who attended Harrow and Oxford, where he won a reputation for high living. He was photographed on a trip to Tibet canoodling with the granddaughter of another early stalwart of the regime before he moved on to Harvard. Known for his taste for top-end sports cars, he was said to have scared the life out of the daughter of the US ambassador by taking her for a high-speed, night-time spin through Beijing. The family belonged to the aristocracy of the People's Republic known as the "princelings". Bo's father was Mao's finance minister before being purged in the Cultural Revolution and then rehabilitated as one of the Communist party's "Eight Immortals". Gu's father had been a prominent general in the People's Liberation Army. Media savvy, good looking and smart – Bo wore immaculate western suits – they seemed untouchable. But now Gu stands charged with the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, who had worked with the family for a dozen years and whose body was found last November in a hotel in the Chongqing hills used by Gu. His death was attributed officially to excessive consumption of alcohol, though Heywood drank little. The corpse was cremated before a postmortem could be performed. British diplomats did not query this. But in February, Wang Lijun, a close associate of Bo whom he had demoted, drove to the US consulate in Chengdu and spilled a lot of beans, including the allegation that Heywood had been poisoned by Gu and a family servant after a dispute. The case swiftly went viral on Chinese websites and in foreign media. Bo tried to keep up a brave face at the annual session of China's legislature, the National People's Congress, in the spring. But Premier Wen Jiabao, whom Bo's father had tried to purge after the 1989 Beijing massacre for his association with reformers, warned of the disaster a new Cultural Revolution would constitute – an obvious dig at Bo's "red songs". The one-time rock star of Chinese politics was sacked from his post in Chongqing and suspended from the Communist party pending the conclusions of a disciplinary investigation. A probe into Gu and Heywood was opened, leading to the announcement on Thursday that she had been charged with murder following a row involving her son, who remains prudently in his flat in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gu story provided a rich mine, though nobody knew what was true and what was invention. Bo's second wife, she was said to have undergone psychiatric care, and to have fed Heywood soup laced with cyanide. One Chinese website said she had paraded round after Heywood's death in a general's uniform proclaiming that she could do as she wished, a Chinese Lady Macbeth out of control. British newspapers discovered that she had lived for a time in a flat in Bournemouth with Heywood while she tried to negotiate with a local company to introduce their hot-air balloons into China; neighbours said he had been seen pinching her bottom. A Cambodia-based French architect was also involved; the Financial Times found that he had helped to negotiate the purchase of two expensive flats in South Kensington in the block where Princess Diana lived before her marriage. More fundamentally, the saga is an unusually public revelation of how the last major state ruled by a Communist party operates and the extraordinary trajectory of its leaders. Bo, who was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution and may have denounced his father before being detained himself for five years, subsequently moved up to become mayor of the big northern port of Dalian. It was there that Heywood, whose job in China was to represent Aston Martin, met him and his family, helping to get Guagua into elite British schools; the fees, far in excess of Bo's earnings, were apparently paid by an educational foundation set up by a local businessman who benefited from the mayor's favours. Bo went on to become commerce minister in 2004 and ascended to the 25-person politburo in 2007. But he had made enemies at the centre and instead of getting promotion in the capital was sent to Chongqing, which he adroitly turned into a springboard for national power. So far so good, it seemed. But he had overstepped himself. His ambition was too transparent for a regime in which, whatever the realities, senior figures have to maintain appearances of being servants of the people and of the party. His evident desire to muscle his way to the very top of the system can only have alarmed his colleagues. When rumours spread last November that the portfolio he wanted on the nine-man standing committee was for internal security and legal affairs, that alarm must have redoubled. In Chongqing, he had presided over a ruthless anti-crime campaign that swept up businessmen and anybody who stood in his way. He had wiretapped the current leader, Hu Jintao, when he visited the city. After his fall, there was talk that he might have been planning a coup against his fellow "princeling", Xi Jinping, who is set to succeed Hu at this year's Congress. So the "tall poppy" was waiting to be chopped down. The Heywood affair was the weapon for which his foes were waiting. But if Bo had the come-uppance his ambition foreshadowed, it had to be handled carefully. This was not so much because of the residual support he enjoyed from leftists and old folk nostalgic for Mao. Rather, the concern was to preserve the party's purity. It would not do for a member of the politburo to be accused of involvement in the murder of a foreigner or the corruption in which his family must have indulged to support its lifestyle. That would have meant that the party, which officially is never mistaken, had been fooled. So the blame had to be heaped on Gu, who is accused of killing Heywood after a business dispute to protect her son. Bo will, no doubt, be sanctioned, expelled from the party and kept under house arrest but he will escape the supreme punishment. Though official reports of the case last week convicted her in advance, Gu may be saved from execution by her mental state and the argument that she acted to protect her son from Heywood. But the key factor for the leadership is to put a distance between what happened in the Chongqing hills and the political movement that has ruled China since 1949. For all its economic progress, the bottom line remains the preservation of political power. The error of Bo and Gu was to imagine themselves bigger than the system. In today's China, that is the cardinal sin. Bo Xilai Gu Kailai China Neil Heywood Jonathan Fenby guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Beijing's champion investors flock to London Posted: 28 Jul 2012 04:04 PM PDT In the wake of the Olympic torch have come some of China's biggest companies, attracted by Britain's openness to foreign investment, and buying up some very well-known names China blew previous Olympic hosts out of the water by pumping £20bn into the Beijing Games, which memorably closed with the spectacle of fireworks exploding in the shape of the interlocking rings. The monster budget was a not-very-subtle display of China's financial firepower. The striking bird's nest stadium, with its ribbons of steel, was a symbol of the huge country's economic prowess. And though the Olympic cauldron may now be burning in east London, Beijing is still flexing its financial muscles. On Friday senior UK government ministers courted Chinese industrialists at a summit in the capital as the coalition desperately tries to pull in overseas investors to Britain. China is already the second-largest overseas investor in London, and the third biggest in the UK as a whole. It has the outspoken backing of the UK government: on a trip to the world's second-largest economy in January, George Osborne encouraged investors there to put money into British transport, energy and utility projects. Three days later, China Investment Corporation (CIC), the country's sovereign wealth fund, bought a 9% stake in Thames Water. And a few days ago, Wales & West Utilities, the company that operates Wales's gas infrastructure, was sold to a Chinese consortium in a £645m deal. Chinese oil enterprises have also just bought two North Sea oil fields in one day, albeit from Canadian companies: China's top refiner, Sinopec, acquired a $1.5bn stake in the North Sea operations of Talisman, while the China National Offshore Oil Corporation splashed out $15bn on Nexen. The deep-pocketed Chinese are now the power behind the throne of British companies ranging from Thames Water and Scotland's biggest mainland oil refinery, Grangemouth, to Weetabix, bespoke suitmaker Gieves & Hawkes, Harvey Nichols and Pringle. The UK drew the line when the state-owned telecoms group Huawei offered to pay for mobile phone coverage on the underground as a gift between Olympic nations, but it is already BT's strategic partner in developing the national broadband network in Britain and on Friday promised to create 1,000 new UK jobs.Its chairman, Sun Yafang, praised the UK's "free and open market" and "efficient, supportive and transparent government". All that cash comes from one pool of money: China's massive stockpile of foreign exchange reserves, worth about £2 trillion at present, says Aman Wang, the London-based head of KPMG's global China practice. Most of the funds flow to CIC and the state administration of foreign exchange, an arm of China's central bank. The UK continues to attract more foreign investment than any other European country, creating more than 112,000 jobs in the last year, a near 20% increase on the previous year, business secretary Vince Cable announced last week. So what gives Britain the edge? Wang cites the flexible labour market vis-a-vis countries like Germany and France, a wealth of senior managerial staff and financial talent, a benign tax regime and high-end manufacturing expertise in areas such as aviation. "Politically it's a relatively open environment for foreign investors," he adds. "The UK government has done a reasonably good job promoting the infrastructure sector at national level, and at state level Scotland and Wales have been promoting themselves." Just last week, it emerged that China also harbours ambitions to become a major player in the UK energy industry by building a series of new nuclear power stations. Two Beijing-backed energy groups are in separate talks to buy the Horizon consortium, which plans to build two UK reactors, from its German owners E.ON and RWE. China's companies are pushing forward globally: Chinese investment abroad has swelled from an annual average of below $3bn before 2005 to more than $60bn in 2010 and 2011, according to a recent report by consultancy Rhodium Group, which specialises in China. Garry Pass, managing director of NVC UK, a wholly owned subsidiary of China's largest lighting company, says: "We welcome people here a lot more than other European countries." The company is supplying lighting to the 2012 Olympics, having started from a London office in 2009 with a sales force of 10 and two designers. Sales were £6,000 then. That figure ballooned to £2m by May 2012. And now the firm is plotting its expansion into mainland Europe, using Britain as a base – a common strategy. Investing China Sovereign wealth funds Energy industry Utilities Financial sector Asia Pacific Julia Kollewe guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Electronics industries in East Asia embrace vertical integration Posted: 29 Jul 2012 03:48 AM PDT The staircase model, a business model which emphasizes vertical integration, is growing in popularity in the electronics industries of China, Japan and South Korea. The model which originated in Japan...

Japan considers using force to protect controversial Senkaku islands Posted: 29 Jul 2012 03:44 AM PDT Japan may dispatch military forces around the Senkaku Islands, also known as the Diaoyutai Islands, to defend what it believes to be its territory, said Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the N...

After Qidong Protests, China Cancels Waste Project Posted: 27 Jul 2012 10:00 PM PDT Angry demonstrators entered a government office in the port city of Qidong to protest a waste discharge plant that they said would pollute the water supply.

Pawn or Deft Operator: 2 Sides Seen in China Suspect Posted: 27 Jul 2012 10:00 PM PDT Gu Kailai, the 53-year-old Chinese lawyer charged with murdering a British businessman, presented different faces to different people.

China Wins Two Gold Medals in Swimming Posted: 27 Jul 2012 10:00 PM PDT Sun Yang of China won the 400-meter freestyle, brushing aside a controversy over his top rival being disqualified in the morning and then reinstated for the final.

China Court Dismisses Ni Yulan’s Fraud Conviction Posted: 26 Jul 2012 10:00 PM PDT A Chinese appeals court on Friday upheld a conviction against Ni Yulan, a human rights activist who fought for people evicted from their homes, for causing a disturbance.

Chinese enterprises move abroad to cut costs Posted: 29 Jul 2012 03:40 AM PDT Due to the country's industrial slowdown, China's state-run and private enterprises have shifting their investments and factories to other countries to reduce production costs, the Beijing-based Huaxi...

Chinese man chooses wife over mother in boating accident Posted: 29 Jul 2012 03:40 AM PDT A 28-year-old villager from Feidong county in China's eastern Anhui province was faced with a difficult dilemma when both his mother and wife fell into a lake and he had to decide who to rescue first,...

Slack domestic demand causes shares of Chinese companies to drop Posted: 29 Jul 2012 03:40 AM PDT While Chinese authorities have repeatedly called for stimulating domestic demand, deeming economic transformation as their most important mission, a weak economic environment and overdraft consumption...

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