It is the last thing the residents of Chongqing would have expected to see.
But the Yangtze river, which runs through the city in south-western China, turned a bright shade of orange-red yesterday.
The waterway where the Yangtze met the Jialin River provided a fascinating contrast as the red started to filter into the other river.
As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wraps up meetings today in Beijing, it’s hard to say how her most recent Asia-Pacific trip has gone. And that’s partly because interpreting media reports from the Chinese side is more art than science.
Faced with tens of thousands of protesters contending that a Beijing-backed plan for “moral and national education” amounted to brainwashing and political indoctrination, Hong Kong’s chief executive backpedaled somewhat on Saturday and revoked a 2015 deadline for every school to start teaching the subject.
‘The Ten Grave Problems’ 十大文问题 forms the second section of a three-part feuilleton or ‘pamphlet’ (in its earlier rabble-rousing sense) by Deng Yuwen 邓聿文 titled ‘The Political Legacy of Hu-Wen’ 胡温的政治遗产. It appeared online in Caijing 财经 magazine in late August-early September. Although the author echoes the formal Party line and extols the peerless achievements of the Hu-Wen decade, Deng goes on to deliver an accusatory accounting of China’s underlying social, economic, regional, political and ideological problems. He frames them as monumentally important issues that have grown in scale and gravity as a result of a stability obsessed government that, under the cover of consensual politics, has allowed pressing concerns to fester. They are issues of critical importance not only for China’s ruling party, but by extension for the world as a whole. An indictment of political lassitude, ‘The Ten Grave Problems’ is also framed as an agenda that demands the immediate attention of the party-state’s incoming leaders.
From their website:
88 Bar (八八吧, pronounced bābāba in Mandarin) is a group blog about tech, media and design in the Greater China region. Our “bar” is a virtual space for our writers to come together and explore ideas as a group. While we don’t have a fixed editorial mandate, we have covered several topics regularly over the years, including: Ethnography of Tech, China Meme Report, Typography Design, and State Capitalism Watch.
In his speech Thursday to the Democratic National Convention, President Obama’s mentions of China added up to just a couple dozen words, but they underscored a new and significant role the Asian power is playing in the 2012 campaign.
They’re still hung over from a 4 trillion yuan spending spree initiated by the central government nearly four years ago, but local governments across China are pressing ahead anyway with huge new investment plans.
In late August, for example, the government of Guangdong province said it would expand ocean resource exploitation with 177 projects. The plan is to attract investments of more than 1 trillion yuan over the next five years.
Thirty-six people died recently on a Shaanxi province highway when a double-decker bus slammed into a fuel tanker.
The crash underscored ongoing demands for beefing up traffic law enforcement and improving the design of these often-crowded overnight buses, which transport nearly 180 million passengers in China every year.
Only three passengers emerged alive from the sleeper bus early August 26, when the long-distance bus collided with a truck methanol in Yan’an and burst into flames.
Lea Cao had his first inkling that something was wrong when he got a long-distance phone call from relatives in southeastern China.
His family members in Fuzhou phoned Cao in New York to say that his parents and brother had failed to arrive at the local train station as scheduled on the night of July 23, 2011. The train was already three hours overdue, and they were worried.
“At first, I wasn’t concerned,” Cao recalled, since delays are not uncommon for trains in China. Even the newly opened high-speed train on which his family was traveling had been known to run late.
Something big is about to happen in China. After ruling the country for a decade, China’s current leadership, helmed by President Hu Jintao, will transfer power to a new group of leaders. The process will be opaque, the date of the transition is a secret, and no one knows for sure who will be among China’s next group of senior leaders. About Xi Jinping, the man presumed to fill Hu Jintao’s top slot, Chinese people know next to nothing.
