News » Politics » President Ma calls for talks on development of Diaoyutais resources

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• President Ma calls for talks on development of Diaoyutais resources
• Ctrip's leadership in online travel market shaken by new rivals
• Beijing's 45,588 car owners tired of 'problems' in inspection
• 8 charged with leaking China's CPI figures to press
• Japan says Abe misquoted by Washington Post
• China's Leadership Transition Discussed at Council on Foreign Relations
• Rare Independent Tibet Exhibit in NYC
• Household China hotsauce turns 'high-end' in US
• Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang joins Lenovo in advisory capacity
• Steven Chow involved in theme park project in Zhejiang
• Only one Guo Degang
• Hong Kong implements new measures to cool property market
• China unlikely to join looming currency war: experts
• China's travel agencies promise a holiday for the lungs
• Obama meets Abe, calls for diplomacy on Diaoyutais
• Waistlines growing faster than GDP in China: report
• Crisis looms as local government debt to mature this year
• Pollution concerns drive air purifier sales in China
• Pandas keep Scotland guessing over mating game
• Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw – review

President Ma calls for talks on development of Diaoyutais resources Posted: 24 Feb 2013 04:10 AM PST Taiwan's president Ma Ying-jeou called Saturday for negotiations to develop the resources in the disputed Diaoyutais and reiterated that Taiwan holds sovereignty over the island chain. While sovereig...

Ctrip's leadership in online travel market shaken by new rivals Posted: 24 Feb 2013 03:54 AM PST Last year was a tough one for Ctrip International — China's largest online travel service provider — in terms of market share and its CEO Fan Min as the growing number of online travel agencies pose...

Beijing's 45,588 car owners tired of 'problems' in inspection Posted: 24 Feb 2013 03:22 AM PST More than 45,000 private car owners have petitioned for reform in the government's annual inspection on private cars in Beijing, complaining on their microblogs that unfair requests by inspectors migh...

8 charged with leaking China's CPI figures to press Posted: 24 Feb 2013 02:42 AM PST Eight government officials and employees from banks or securities firms were convicted for "leaking CPI figures to the press and endangering national economic security," the Beijing-based Legal Evenin...

Japan says Abe misquoted by Washington Post Posted: 24 Feb 2013 02:30 AM PST The Japanese government said prime minister Shinzo Abe's statement about China made to the Washington Post in an interview on Feb. 21 has been misquoted and the quotations were misleading. The Post...

China's Leadership Transition Discussed at Council on Foreign Relations Posted: 23 Feb 2013 05:34 PM PST Cheng Li and Elizabeth Economy discuss China's leadership transition at the Council on Foreign Relations in NYC on Friday February 22nd 2013. They debate the power balance within the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee, which recently decreased in size from nine to seven members.

Rare Independent Tibet Exhibit in NYC Posted: 23 Feb 2013 05:31 PM PST At Tibet House in New York City, a rare exhibit displays photos and artifacts from a period of Tibetan independence in the first half of the 20th century. [Ganden Thurman, Executive Director Tibet House USA]: "It's in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Tibetan declaration of independence from the Manchu empire, which was collapsing at that time, had just recently collapsed, I think in 1911.

Household China hotsauce turns 'high-end' in US Posted: 24 Feb 2013 01:38 AM PST Product prices of Lao Gan Ma, a famous sauce brand in China, have tripled in the United States, reports Guangzhou Daily. A jar of the brand's chili sauce that costs nearly 8 yuan (US$1.3) in an onl...

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang joins Lenovo in advisory capacity Posted: 24 Feb 2013 01:38 AM PST Jerry Yang, the Taiwan-born co-founder of Yahoo, has joined Lenovo's board as an observer from Feb. 20. The company hopes his advice will help the world's No. 2 PC maker expand its smartphone and tabl...

Steven Chow involved in theme park project in Zhejiang Posted: 24 Feb 2013 01:38 AM PST Hong Kong movie star Steven Chow has joined forces with ChinaVision Media Group to build a theme park in China's Zhejiang province, Chinese property news website Guandian reported. ChinaVision anno...

Only one Guo Degang Posted: 24 Feb 2013 01:38 AM PST A series of photoshopped photos under the theme "when there is only Guo Degang left in the world" have gone viral on the internet in China. Guo is a star of xiangsheng, a comedic style characterized b...

Hong Kong implements new measures to cool property market Posted: 24 Feb 2013 12:54 AM PST Two new measures to cool the property market will be introduced to reduce immediate demand, John Tsang, Financial secretary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government announced Friday. ...

China unlikely to join looming currency war: experts Posted: 24 Feb 2013 12:54 AM PST The finance ministers and central bankers of G20 member countries tried to talk down the risk of a currency war in a meeting held earlier this month. However, the world's major economies may not be...

China's travel agencies promise a holiday for the lungs Posted: 24 Feb 2013 12:54 AM PST Fresh air has become a major selling point for tourism as cities in northern China continue to experience appalling air quality. Tours advertising a holiday for the lungs were highly popular during th...

Obama meets Abe, calls for diplomacy on Diaoyutais Posted: 24 Feb 2013 12:54 AM PST The US president, Barack Obama, has told Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, that he hopes territorial disputes can be handled through diplomatic channels at their meeting on Friday. On his visit t...

Waistlines growing faster than GDP in China: report Posted: 24 Feb 2013 12:54 AM PST After 20 years of the country's rapid economic growth, the most frequently overheard sentence at a school reunion for China's middle-aged people may be: "You've got bigger!" The proportion of people i...

Crisis looms as local government debt to mature this year Posted: 24 Feb 2013 12:54 AM PST China's local government debt crisis has been getting worse as national statistics show that 53% of local government debt will be due by the end of 2013, when local governments enter a peak period fo...

Pollution concerns drive air purifier sales in China Posted: 24 Feb 2013 12:54 AM PST Both local and foreign home appliance manufacturers are increasing their production of air purifiers in China as they enjoy booming sales because of the growing public attention on poor air quality in...

Pandas keep Scotland guessing over mating game Posted: 23 Feb 2013 11:42 AM PST A year after their arrival at Edinburgh Zoo, Tian Tian and Yang Guang are on the verge of their greatest performance It is not hard to get all protective and infantile when you observe dimly your first giant panda through a glass partition. "Look, his wee pond is all iced over. Won't it hurt his wee paws when he goes for a drink?" I ask the keeper at Edinburgh Zoo. "No, they prefer cold temperatures and they enjoy smashing the ice with their paws," she replies. I grew up in an era when Johnny Morris was king of animal television and so I have a habit of personalising the behaviour of animals, as Johnny used to do, when I watch wildlife programmes. Often I ascribe Glaswegian vernacular to them. Thus, lions and tigers are always "big" and they say things to each other like: "Ahm starvin', big man, let's go and jump a few of those antelopes for wur lunch." At the panda enclosure last week I was at it again. Yang Guang, the male of the pair currently engaging the gawping hordes, was sitting underneath his tree chomping on bamboo shoots. Unlike other wild beasts, he is happy to hold eye contact. I fancy he is challenging us. "Have you got a problem, pal?" You can also see why people are enchanted by them. The big black patches on their face make them childlike. And when Tian Tian (Sweetie) is seated and eating, she seems very human in her movements. Yes, Edinburgh's two giant pandas have swung to the rescue of headline writers again. Yang Guang and Tian Tian's keepers have begun to observe behaviour that suggests that they may be about to mate. Tian Tian has been calling out to Yang Guang (Sunshine) in the compound next door. Sunshine has been doing handstands and marking his territory in all sorts of ways. "Ah'm up for the Cup," he'd be telling his pals. It's the perfect feelgood story for the spring. The female is in season for a mere two days and the show may be all over inside a minute. The keepers will expect to know when the time is right by a series of signals that will include Tian Tian's temperature readings. The male is prone to be more aggressive at this stage and the keepers are acutely aware that Yang Guang can be inadvertently harmed while mating. Scotland has been treated to mini treatises on how male giant pandas set about "marking their territory". On the Scotsman's front page, underneath a picture of Yang Guang's trapeze routine, the caption read: "Tian Tian has started calling out to Yang Guang, who has been peering into her cage." Surely there's a typo in there? Staff members at the zoo are cautiously optimistic that mating could take place as early as next week. Under the terms of the agreement with the Beijing government which underpins the 10-year panda project, though, any baby panda must be sent to China after two years. After that it will participate in China's breeding programme in the wild and never see Scotland again. In effect, Scotland has rented the pandas for this period, which started on their arrival 14 months ago. The annual fee is around £700,000 plus food and sundries. Home for each of the pandas in Edinburgh Zoo is an enclosure the size of a small kitchen showroom. It's a split-level number with a cave, a pond, and some shrubbery on a grass and rock terrain. Quite how the pandas will feel after 10 years of prowling this same patch is open to suggestion. The zoo insists it has a robust "enrichment" programme in which they are trained to do exercises and are made to "hunt" for food, which, although they are carnivores, consists almost solely of bamboo. It's clear that all those engaged in the welfare of the pandas work hard to ensure their wellbeing. But that is if you can believe any beast can be comfortable pacing up and down the same artificial strip of piece of turf for 10 years. The zoo is sensitive about any criticism of the beasts' mental welfare. "While we cannot replace their habitat in the wild, we can ensure the animals in our collections have everything they need to lead a safe, healthy and fulfilling life. It's very easy to forward our own emotions onto animals and become anthropomorphic in our views towards them. This is unfair to the animals as they do not think that way." How do they know? Is there not a case for simply letting these extraordinary-looking creatures take their chances with nature's indiscriminate pruning fork? No species has a sacrosanct right to everlasting life and surely it would be better to die out while living free rather than appear in this endless circus. Iain Valentine, director of conservation and research at the zoo, has heard it all before. "Pandas have existed on earth for between four million and eight million years," he said. "Their problems only started when we arrived and began to make our presence felt. We have a moral duty to conserve them and to educate people about their habitat, health and the threats they face." John Robins, of Animal Concern, is a persistent critic of the panda project which he describes as a "tawdry, geo-political carve-up". Whatever else the agreement may be about the pandas' mental and physical welfare is not the primary objective, he says. "China has turned its panda reserves into vulgar theme parks where people stage marriage ceremonies and the rich buy holiday homes. I'd much rather see the £1m or so spent in lobbying the Chinese government to develop proper national parks where the pandas can roam free. We shouldn't be breeding them for this questionable purpose." In the viewing room another group of 50 or so visitors are willing Tian Tian to do something that will make their entrance fee worthwhile. The children are outnumbered by the adults, one of whom thinks it's a good idea to use flash photography as he aims his camera at the beast. How long though, will this national novelty last; of pressing your nose up against a window and watching a largely inert animal eat and sleep again and again and again? If a new baby panda appears later this year in Edinburgh, it will be a great time for Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, to bury bad news. For this will be a historically unique event of seismic proportions: the world's first Scottish panda. But will it come out for an independent Scotland? And can we please call it something normal like Colin or Tracey, rather than Twinkle or anything else too cutesy? Scotland Animals Edinburgh Animal welfare China Kevin McKenna guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw – review Posted: 23 Feb 2013 04:05 PM PST Tash Aw's tale of five migrant workers carving out lives in a modernising Shanghai is the stuff of a hit TV miniseries At one point in Tash Aw's fine new novel about what people call "the new China" a young woman is trying to photograph herself on her mobile phone in a park in Guangzhou, hoping to enliven her internet dating profile with an image that doesn't make her look like an immigrant factory worker (which she is). An old man who sells tickets for the rowing boats on the lake offers to take the picture for her. He looks uncertainly at her phone. She wonders if he understands how to work it. Then he says: "This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school." This is the world of the book, where traditional societies seem to have leapfrogged their way into a modernity without signposts, where the past isn't solid enough to build on but too substantial to be ignored. The five main characters, three men and two women, all come to Shanghai (by some definitions the world's largest city) from Malaysia, though their backgrounds range from old money to rural deprivation. As a title, Five Star Billionaire is close to brash, and the book's storyline could persuasively be pitched to a producer in search of a blockbuster miniseries, but the reading experience it offers is coolly engrossing – with elements of frustrating evasion – rather than propulsive. Tash Aw doesn't exactly kill plot momentum or the emotional impact of the situations he creates, but he certainly keeps them in check. Narrative hints are often indirect, like clues in a detective story, as when a passing reference to a character having written an article deploring the architecture of Gaudí suggests that a conversation almost a hundred pages earlier wasn't in fact spontaneous. It's possible to reach the book's final stretch without being sure that this is a story of revenge. If it is, then revenge is being eaten very cold indeed, from the chiller cabinet if not the freezer. Three of the characters are connected by past events, while the other two, despite similar humble backgrounds, have highly contrasting encounters with Shanghai. Phoebe the factory worker reinvents herself as the manager of an upmarket beauty spa thanks to an appropriated identity card, while Gary the manufactured pop star falls from grace when a drunken outburst in a bar, captured on a mobile phone, punctures his angelic image. Implosion of this sort is a permanent possibility, in a sense the proper response to Shanghai. Phoebe's roommate Yanyan simply vegetates after losing her job, and the property developer Justin Lim, designated as the family fixer because he's reliable and can hold his drink, has his health break down in a way that has clear existential overtones. Even Phoebe, when she looks down on the city at last from a penthouse apartment, is as much frightened as thrilled. Yes, she can see Shanghai. But Shanghai can see her. She and Gary both feel like fakes, not cheap market-stall knock-offs but the sort of high-grade counterfeit that has its own lesser exclusiveness. Their falsity has become part of their true selves. The book teems with advice, slogans, formulas for success. Chapters have headings such as "Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself" or the more Confucian "A Strong Fighting Spirit Swallows Mountains and Rivers". Phoebe reads self-help books with titles such as Sophistify Yourself or indeed Secrets of a Five Star Billionaire. She makes a list to help her navigate western-style meals ("1 Soup (+ bread). 2 Fish (flat knife). 3 Meat. 4 Cheese. 5 Dessert. 6 Coffee"). Preparing for a date, she decides to "Dress for Sex-Cess", following the advice of one book, while Yanyan, reading from another, tells her that beauty comes from inner confidence. It's never clear, either to the characters or the reader, whether the breakthrough moment comes when people manage to strike a balance between conflicting codes, or when instinct overrides them altogether. The book is full of missed connections. When Phoebe was a factory worker, for instance, she had a poster of Gary on her wall. After his disgrace he strikes up an internet friendship with her, incognito. She helps him survive emotionally, and gives him the confidence to reinvent himself – though his transformation in a few months from showbiz puppet to singer-songwriter is the only unconvincing strand in the book. He feels she knows the real him, and wants to have no secrets. Can't their counterpointed lives be brought into some sort of harmony? One of the book's techniques is to describe something from two sides, but with a delay. So Gary's comeback concert in a tiny bohemian venue is described from his point of view, and then 60 pages later as experienced by someone in the audience. The accounts aren't dramatically different, but the delay prevents them from coalescing into a single impression. They're notes that refuse to become a chord, in a way that is characteristic of the book's seductive if slightly perverse preference for the muted and the unresolved, even when portraying the seething life of a city that is more like "a whole continent, with a heart as deep and unknown as the forests of the Amazon and as vast and wild as the deserts of Africa". But there's never a moment that describes Phoebe's online friendship with the unrecognised Gary from her point of view. I have to admit that I started inventing plot on my own account to explain this absence of what had promised to be the heart of the book. Had Yanyan hacked into Phoebe's email, for instance? But the second shoe never dropped, whether it would have proved to be a fake – high-end or low – or even the real thing. Fiction China Asia Pacific Adam Mars-Jones guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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