Recently appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary discussed exchange rate, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and North Korea in his first meeting with Xi Jinping and the rest of the newly appointed Chinese leadership.
Former Morgan Stanley Asia guru Stephen Roach is more bullish on Chinese GDP this year than outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao. Jiabao had it at 7.5%. Roach estimated 8%.
Xinhua erroneously reports that Party Secretary of Jiangsu province, Wu Renbao, was once featured on the cover of Time magazine. Other Chinese media follow suit, in the latest embarrassment for Xinhua.
A country’s foreign policy should be judged on the basis of its actions as well as its rhetoric. When we conduct a careful examination of Chinese policies and actions, we see that Chinese foreign policy is actually ambivalent, even weak.
Does Sina Weibo provide an equal platform for expression for both men and women in China? According to a recent study conducted by Sun Huan, a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies and a research assistant at the Center for Civic Media at MIT, the answer is probably no.
An ordinary winter evening in the Legation Quarter of Peking, where foreign embassies and consulates were located, January 7, 1937. Cold. The heavy sound of Japanese armored cars, out on patrol down the busy shopping streets that flank the Forbidden City. (Japan would occupy the city seven months later.) The martial sounds and the crowds seem not to distract a couple of teenage girls as they make their plans to go skating for an hour or so, under the arc lights of the newly constructed French ice rink. They leave open the question of where they might meet later in the evening.
As the greatest coal-producing and consuming nation in the world, China would seem an unlikely haven for wind power. Yet the country now boasts a world-class industry that promises to make low-carbon technology more affordable and available to all. Conducting an empirical study of China’s remarkable transition and the possibility of replicating their model elsewhere, Joanna I. Lewis adds greater depth to a theoretical understanding of China’s technological innovation systems and its current and future role in a globalized economy.
Lewis focuses on China’s specific methods of international technology transfer, its forms of international cooperation and competition, and its implementation of effective policies promoting the development of a home-grown industry. Just a decade ago, China maintained only a handful of operating wind turbines—all imported from Europe and the United States. Today, the country is the largest wind power market in the world, with turbines made almost exclusively in its own factories. Though setbacks are possible, China could one day come to dominate global wind turbine sales, becoming a hub of technological innovation and a major instigator of low-carbon economic change. —Columbia University Press
Vice Chariman of the China Renewable Energy Society says a new policy may abolish one-time subsidies, while at the same time, a separate subsidy based on power production would be extended to low-voltage plants that don’t typically supply utilities.
By enhancing his celebrity through publicity stunts, Ai has unwittingly empowered the Chinese Communist Party by outwardly conforming to its definition of a dissident: a narcissist more attuned to the whims of foreign admirers than to the interests of his own people.
Before getting pregnant with her second child, Lu Qingmin went to the family-planning office to apply for a birth permit. Officials in her husband’s Hunan village where she was living turned her down, but she had the baby anyway. She may eventually be fined $1,600—about what she makes in two months in her purchasing job at a Guangdong paint factory. “Everyone told me to hide so the family-planning people wouldn’t find me, but I went around everywhere,” she told me. “In the past, that place had very strict family planning, but now the policy has loosened.
