Foreign investors that specialise in buying up distressed debt are queuing outside the industry's door, but bankers say China's reluctance to pay the price of a privately funded clean-up means that door probably won't open.
As the U.S. threatens military action against Syria, Washington’s focus on Asian-Pacific security seems to be wavering. Deborah Kan speaks with columnist Andy Browne about the changing dynamics of the Sino-U.S. relationship.
At home, the Party sees parallels between Gaddafi and Morsi and its own regime. Any legitimization of the West’s role in their demises is inherently a legitimization of future interference in China with the aim of undermining the Party.
Last weekend, Charles Xue Manzi, a Chinese American multi-millionaire investor and opinion leader on one of China’s most popular microblogs, appeared in handcuffs in an interview aired on China Central Television (CCTV). Xue is just the most visible blogger to be snared by a new Chinese Communist Party dragnet that threatens to charge with defamation any netizen who
When a sex video involving a Chongqing official went viral on the Internet on November 2012, like millions of others, Tan Linling clicked out of curiosity.
To her surprise, Tan recognized the woman in the video as a former colleague and friend named Zhao Hongxia. Tan immediately contacted Zhao and told her about the nation’s hottest news: a video recording of Lei Zhengfu, Communist Party secretary of Beibei District in the large southwestern region of Chongqing, having an extramarital affair. The video was put online by a Beijing-based citizen journalist.
While the media keeps its eye on the ongoing Diaoyu/Senkaku islands dispute, heating up yet again this week after Chinese naval ships and aircraft were spotted circling the area, a parallel, possibly game-changing development in China-Japan relations has gone largely unreported: the recent increase in collaboration between the world’s second and third largest economies in a host of science, technology, and business fields, Nationalist rhetoric aside, at the level of
China’s age of retirement has long been a subject of controversy, as the country’s aging population and slowing economic growth have made caring for the elderly an increasingly daunting task. Recently, Yang Yansui, a professor at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, floated an idea to address the issue. Her idea was widely shared on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging platform popular in China, rising to become the number one most-discussed comment on the site. But it was with derision, not support, that many Weibo users retweeted and commented on the professor’s proposal.
Paula S. Harrell:
The Beijing rumor-mill is back on overdrive. With the trial of Bo Xilai only barely concluded and the country now openly speculating on the length of the disgraced politician’s likely sentence, factional battles targeting Bo’s remaining supporters have moved center-stage, as the government has launched an anti-graft probe into the country’s petroleum industry, a sector heavily connected to Zhou Yongkang, China’s feared former Security Chief who reputedly continued to back Bo Xilai against the wishes of the rest of the Politburo.
Though often described with foreboding buzzwords such as “The Great Firewall” and the “censorship regime,” Internet regulation in China is rarely either obvious or straightforward. This was the inspiration for China specialist Jason Q. Ng to write an innovative computer script that would make it possible to deduce just which terms are suppressed on China’s most important social media site, Sina Weibo. The remarkable and groundbreaking result is Blocked on Weibo, which began as a highly praised blog and has been expanded here to list over 150 forbidden keywords, as well as offer possible explanations why the Chinese government would find these terms sensitive.
As Ng explains, Weibo (roughly the equivalent of Twitter), with over 500 million registered accounts, censors hundreds of words and phrases, ranging from fairly obvious terms, including “tank” (a reference to the “Tank Man” who stared down the Chinese army in Tiananmen Square) and the names of top government officials (if they can’t be found online, they can’t be criticized), to deeply obscure references, including “hairy bacon” (a coded insult referring to Mao’s embalmed body).
With dozens of phrases that could get a Chinese Internet user invited to the local police station “for a cup of tea” (a euphemism for being detained by the authorities), Blocked on Weibo offers an invaluable guide to sensitive topics in modern-day China as well as a fascinating tour of recent Chinese history. —The New Press
Victor Mair, UPenn Language Log (August 23, 2013)
James Griffiths, Shanghaiist (September 5, 2013)
Michael Gregory, CBC News (August 29, 2013)
