KFC China sheds 1,000 chicken producers to regain consumer trust

KFC China sheds 1,000 chicken producers to regain consumer trust
Famous singer's son's rape scandal provokes debate on child-rearing
Shanghai police investigate toxic school uniforms
Ang Lee’s Oscar win throws up censorship debate in China
Social Change Leaves China Struggling to Define Role of Law
The false-alarmists behind this shrinking population panic | Dean Baker
Letters: More creative thinking needed about maths comparisons
Lotus hypermarket owes US$200m and a downsize this year
Europe attracts more Chinese investment than US in two years: report
Taiwan export orders rise for 5th consecutive month in January
International review of human rights report a milestone: Ma
Over 100 bikers to join Taiwan's Grandriders in US
Southwestern China Chemical Plant Blast Injures Six
‘Chinglish’: In Hong Kong, an Audience That Gets the Joke
Chinese banks hike service charges in response to bank card fee cut
China News Broadcast, February 26, 2013: Prospects of Reform under Xi Jinping
Chinese Police Arrest Dissidents Before Party’s Plenary Sessions
HK's US$160m milk powder market to face severe clamp down
Bosses in China try to woo workers as economy recovers
Top China Stories from WSJ: Rural Doctors, Fishing Industry, Nissan

KFC China sheds 1,000 chicken producers to regain consumer trust

Posted: 27 Feb 2013 04:46 AM PST

The Chinese arm of fast food chain KFC has told its network of 25 suppliers to cut ties with more than 1,000 chicken producers deemed high-risk in the hope of regaining consumer trust after a food saf...

Famous singer's son's rape scandal provokes debate on child-rearing

Posted: 27 Feb 2013 04:42 AM PST

An alleged gang rape scandal put the son of renowned Chinese singer Li Shuangjiang under fire over the weekend, sparking debate over how children should be raised in contemporary society. Police insi...

Shanghai police investigate toxic school uniforms

Posted: 27 Feb 2013 04:42 AM PST

Police in Shanghai have started investigating a local garment firm after toxic dye was found in the school uniforms it manufactures, authorities said Monday. Disciplinary supervision authorities are ...

Ang Lee’s Oscar win throws up censorship debate in China

Posted: 26 Feb 2013 05:18 PM PST

The Oscar award for 'Life of Pi' director Ang Lee has aroused a surge of pride among ethnic Chinese but it has also raised serious questions about censorship in China.

Social Change Leaves China Struggling to Define Role of Law

Posted: 26 Feb 2013 07:56 PM PST

New laws governing the use of "pet restrooms" and parental visits, plus a pair of domestic violence cases with wildly different outcomes, illustrate how social change in China is provoking new questions about the role of law in society.

The false-alarmists behind this shrinking population panic | Dean Baker

Posted: 26 Feb 2013 02:30 PM PST

Policy-making elites would have us believe a smaller workforce spells the end of prosperity. Actually, it spells redistribution

The retirement of the baby boom cohorts means that the country's labor force is likely to be growing far more slowly in the decades ahead than it did in prior decades. The United States is not alone in facing this situation. The rate of growth of the workforce has slowed or even turned negative in almost every wealthy country. Japan leads the way, with a workforce that has been shrinking in size for more than a decade.

Slower population growth is affecting the developing world as well. Latin America and much of Asia are seeing much slower population growth than in prior decades. In China, the one-child policy adopted in the late 1970s has virtually ended the growth in its labor force.

According to many media pundits, this picture of stagnant or declining labor forces is cause for panic. After all, it means that countries will be seeing an increase in the ratio of retirees to workers. Countries around the world will be suffering from labor shortages. And with even developing countries experiencing slower population growth, there will be nowhere to turn to make up the shortfall.

The only part of this picture that should, in fact, be scary is the failure of people involved in economic policy debates to have even a basic understanding of economics and arithmetic. There is no reason why the prospect of a stagnant or declining workforce should concern the vast majority of people. Rather, from the standpoint of addressing global warming and other environmental problems, this is great news.

First, a bit of arithmetic would be useful. People involved in economic policy-making tend to have problems with arithmetic, which is why they failed to recognize the housing and stock bubbles. Some simple sums can quickly show that the concerns about falling ratios of workers to retirees are ill-founded. In the United States, the social security trustees project that the ratio of workers to retirees will fall from 2.8 in 2013 to 2.0 in 2035.

It's pretty simple to figure out the impact of this decline. Let's assume that an average retiree consumes 85% as much as the average worker. This means that our 2.8 workers must produce enough goods and services to support the equivalent of 3.65 workers. That would imply each worker gets to keep 76.7% (2.8/3.65) of what they produce, with the rest taken away through taxes or other mechanisms to support pesky retirees.

When the ratio of workers to retirees falls to 2.0 then each worker will get to keep 70.2% (2.0/2.85) of what they produce. This implies a drop in the share of output going to workers of 8% over the next 22 years.

While that would depress living standards, we will also be seeing an increase in potential living standards from rising productivity growth. If productivity grows at the rate of 1.5% annually – roughly the rate it has been growing over the last two decades – then productivity in 2035 will be almost 40% higher than it is today. This means that the fall in the ratio of workers to retirees will take back less than a quarter of the potential gains from productivity growth. (It's true that most workers have seen little benefit from productivity growth over the last three decades, but this points again to the importance of intra-generational distribution; it's not a reason to be distracted by demographic nonsense.)

And this story puts the situation in the worst possible light. After 2035, productivity will continue to grow, but the ratio of workers to retirees will be little changed for the rest of the century. Why, exactly, are we supposed to be so scared?

The story is even more ridiculous for China, where productivity per worker has been increasing by more than 5% annually. This translates into an increase in output per worker of more than 160% over two decades. Do we seriously expect workers in China to be terrified if 10-15% of these gains are pulled away to support a larger population of retirees?

Of course, there is a story of labor shortages in this picture – in the sense that it will be difficult to find workers for the lowest-paying and least productive jobs. With a stagnant or declining labor force, workers will have their choice of jobs. It is unlikely that they will want to work as custodians or dishwashers for $7.25 an hour. They will either take jobs that offer higher pay or these jobs will have to substantially increase their pay in order to compete.

This means that the people who hire low-paid workers to clean their houses, serve their meals, or tend their lawns and gardens will likely have to pay higher wages. That prospect may sound like a disaster scenario for this small group of affluent people, but it sounds like great news for the tens of millions of people who hold these sorts of jobs. It should mean rapidly rising living standards for those who have been left behind over the last three decades.

And that is the basic story of fears over stagnant or declining populations. The people who hire help – the very same who also dominate economic policy debates – are terrified over the prospect that they will have to pay workers more in the future.

But the rest of us can sit back and enjoy watching them sweat as ordinary workers may finally start to see their share of the gains of the economic growth of the last three decades.

Dean Baker

Letters: More creative thinking needed about maths comparisons

Posted: 26 Feb 2013 01:00 PM PST

As someone with over 20 years' experience of East Asian education systems (in Hong Kong, mainland China and Japan), I must take issue with the alarmist response to the report on maths achievement among English schoolchildren (Star maths pupils in England two years behind Asian peers by age 16, 22 February). The relatively numerous east Asian students who, by virtue of an intense regime of exam-oriented drilling – including hours of after-school tutorial classes – acquire a facility in applying a given set of formulae to a clearly delimited range of problems are not guaranteed to become innovative geniuses. Indeed, recent years have witnessed plane-loads of East Asian educational policymakers flying westwards in search of the elixir of "creativity" and "critical thinking".

The claim that "education has historically been highly valued" in east Asia is simplistic. The readiness to sacrifice one's youth to the earnest pursuit of high test scores is certainly deeply embedded. The emphasis of these tests on factual recall and the "correct" application of set formulae is part and parcel of a process of socialisation that aims to produce obedient workers reluctant to question established authority – though thankfully it often fails.

Both Labour and Tory spokesmen call in response for a strengthening of maths teaching. Ensuring all students have a solid grounding in basic numeracy is certainly necessary. However, what is going to give way in a crowded timetable? Modern languages, perhaps? If one is really looking for a weak spot in English schooling, the pitiful neglect of foreign language teaching stands out. In order to flourish, England needs active, responsible citizens, aware of and comfortable with the diversity of their own society and the wider world, equipped both with the skills required for their personal advancement, and with a commitment to advancing the interests of the broader community. Combining a resolute monolingualism, after-school tutoring in maths and test-oriented pedagogy all-round is impoverishing, in every sense.
Dr Edward Vickers
Kyushu University, Japan

Prior to starting my PGCE at the Institute of Education, I taught a range of pupils – Chinese, Japanese and Korean, among others – at an international school in Shanghai for two years. While their maths calculation skills were very advanced, their ability to problem-solve, to think creatively or to answer word problems was much more limited. The statistic that Asian pupils outperform UK pupils in mathematics does not take this into account.

The claim that Asian pupils are two years ahead of UK pupils by the time they reach their GCSEs is wholly unsurprising given that they have probably had the equivalent of two years' extra education (if not more) through late-night crammer schools and private tutoring. I knew many teachers who worked in such schools, often from 3pm to 10pm or later. With limited university places available in these Asian countries (particularly South Korea), each consecutive generation has to meet growing expectations. The cost of this extra cramming is that pupils have significantly less free time to develop hobbies, to play, to relax, to sleep, to form friendships.
Eleanor Adams
London