As Wal-Mart expands in China, activists and academics have found that along with “Wal-Mart culture,” the company has also imported abuses familiar to those who follow Wal-Mart in the United States.
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Rat meat + gelatin + red food coloring + nitrates = lamb. Have you tried it yet?
“This is what a ‘complete’ sheep looks like,” reads a caption under the photoshopped image of a sheep with Jerry, the mouse from Tom and Jerry, as its head. The image was posted by @无锡微生活, a Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter) account that focuses on reporting news related to the city of Wuxi in Jiangsu province. “Now you know why your stomach hurts.”
With a population base of 1.3 billion people, China has no shortage of strange and gruesome crimes, but the attempted murder of Zhu Ling by thallium poisoning in 1995 is burning up China’s social media long after the trails have gone cold. Zhu, a brilliant and beautiful sophomore attending one of China’s most prestigious colleges at the time, is now bed-bound and nearly blind. The only suspect questioned by police was Zhu’s roommate, whose family is rumored to be politically connected. Police quickly released her and she now reportedly lives in the U.S.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues to pursue a long-term, comprehensive military modernization program designed to improve the capacity of its armed forces to fight and win short-duration, high-intensity regional military conflict. Preparing for potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait appears to remain the principal focus and primary driver of China’s military investment. However, as China’s interests have grown and as it has gained greater influence in the international system, its military modernization has also become increasingly focused on investments in military capabilities to conduct a wider range of missions beyond its immediate territorial concerns, including counter-piracy, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, and regional military operations. Some of these missions and capabilities can address international security challenges, while others could serve more narrowly-defined PRC interests and objectives, including advancing territorial claims and building influence abroad.
During their January 2011 summit, U.S. President Barack Obama and then-PRC President Hu Jintao jointly affirmed that a “healthy, stable, and reliable military-to-military relationship is an essential part of [their] shared vision for a positive, cooperative, and comprehensive U.S.-China relationship.” Within that framework, the U.S. Department of Defense seeks to build a military-to-military relationship with China that is sustained and substantive, while encouraging China to cooperate with the United States, our allies and partners, and the greater international community in the delivery of public goods. As the United States builds a stronger foundation for a military-to-military relationship with China, it also will continue to monitor China’s evolving military strategy, doctrine, and force development and encourage China to be more transparent about its military modernization program. In concert with its allies and partners, the United States will continue adapting its forces, posture, and operational concepts to maintain a stable and secure Asia-Pacific security environment.
Rapeseed was ripening in the lush fields ringing the village of Renjia when a local farmer, forced from his home, stepped into the sea of green stalks and pitched a tent.
Less than a day earlier, the farmer and each of his more than 3,000 neighbors in Renjia had been rendered homeless by a powerful earthquake that rocked southwest China’s Sichuan province.
The April 20 quake devastated the village and other parts of mountainous Lushan County. As of May 3, officials said, the temblor registering 7.0 on the Richter scale had killed 196 people and injured 11,740.
It is well-known that overseas fishing fleets are more cavalier in terms of respect for laws and regulations than their domestic counterparts. There are innumerable examples from all over the world of fishing with gears that are not part of agreements, or catching amounts of fish above agreed quotas.
China’s fleets are no exception to this and, as the largest of any country in the world, could be having a particularly acute impact on the resources of host countries.
Anyone wanting a primer on the secret of China’s economic success need look no further than China Development Bank (CDB)—which has displaced the World Bank as the world’s biggest development bank, lending billions to countries around the globe to further Chinese policy goals. In China’s Superbank, Bloomberg authors Michael Forsythe and Henry Sanderson outline how the bank is at the center of China’s domestic economic growth and how it is helping to expand China’s influence in strategically important overseas markets.
100 percent owned by the Chinese government, the CDB holds the key to understanding the inner workings of China’s state-led economic development model, and its most glaring flaws. The bank is at the center of the country’s efforts to build a world-class network of highways, railroads, and power grids, pioneering a lending scheme to local governments that threatens to spawn trillions of yuan in bad loans. It is doling out credit lines by the billions to Chinese solar and wind power makers, threatening to bury global competitors with a flood of cheap products. Another $45 billion in credit has been given to the country’s two biggest telecom equipment makers who are using the money to win contracts around the globe, helping fulfill the goal of China’s leaders for its leading companies to “go global.”
Bringing the story of China Development Bank to life by crisscrossing China to investigate the quality of its loans, China’s Superbank travels the globe, from Africa, where its China-Africa fund is displacing Western lenders in a battle for influence, to the oil fields of Venezuela. As China’s influence continues to grow around the world, many people are asking how far it will extend. China’s Superbank addresses these vital questions, looking at the institution at the heart of this growth. —Bloomberg Press
Edward Chancellor, The Wall Street Journal (February 27,2013)
David Cohen, The Diplomat (January 26, 2013)
Clifford Coonan, The Irish Times (December 11,2012)
This week on Sinica, we deliver a salacious podcast that covers everything you always wanted to know about sex in China, but have been afraid to ask. And with a discussion that stretches from Daoist sex manuals and imperial sex customs to getting jiggy during the Cultural Revolution and even matters like homosexuality in contemporary China, this is a podcast you don't want to miss ... unless talking about sex makes you uncomfortable in which case you might actually want to skip it.
The report which follows measures the conditions for freedom of expression through literature, linguistic rights, Internet freedom and legal obligations. This is an approach anchored both in the breadth of history and in today’s realities, one that reflects PEN’s founding and enduring principles. The recommendations offered here are fair and realistic. We believe these changes can be made.
