Shanghai Pod

Some rather shocking statistics in Thomas Crampton’s blog entry China’s Internet rarely links to foreign websites : Out of 40 million external links on 5 million pages of 15,000 sites in China investigated, only 6% leave for websites geographically situated outside mainland China! Professor Jonathan Zhu of City University of Hong Kong led this research into Chinese hyperlink behavior, which I came across on Tobias Escher’s excellent blog. Escher qualifies the national/provincial distinctions based on a conversation with Zhu: “While this figure is more or less robust he tells me that the distinction between Home vs. Other provinces is still preliminary as it is based on geo-IP location. This might tell you where the server sits but not necessarily much about the “location” of the websites its been hosting. Therefore they are now trying to explore new methods including content mining.” This could certainly be true; out of all links investigated (100%): • 81% of them head for sites within...

China launched its first lunar probe on Wednesday, the first step into its ambitious three-stage moon mission, marking a new milestone in the country's space exploration history. The circumlunar satellite Chang'e-1 blasted off on a Long March 3A carrier rocket at 6:05 p.m. from the No. 3 launching tower in the Xichang Satellite Launch Center of southwestern Sichuan Province. Space experts from Japan, Germany and other countries joined their Chinese colleagues at the launch site to watch the launching process. "The launch was very successful, and everything is proceeding just as it's planned," said Wu Ji, director of the Space Science and Applied Research Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Chang'e-1 separated from carrier rocket at 6:29 p.m. and entered into a 16-hour orbit at 205 kilometers perigee and 50,930 kilometers apogee, according to the Beijing Aerospace Control Center (BACC). Chang'e-1, named after a legendary Chinese goddess of ...

Nearly a quarter of China's carbon emissions are created by goods manufactured and exported to Western consumers. Why ‘Made in China’ should increase our carbon footprint Nearly a quarter of China's carbon emissions are created by goods manufactured and exported to Western consumers, according to research by University of Sussex climate change analysts Dr Tao Wang and Dr Jim Watson. The study, carried out for the Tyndall Centre, suggests that counting carbon emissions within national borders, as is currently the case under the Kyoto Protocol, may be inadequate in deciding who is responsible for emissions reduction. Fair, globalised trade might imply that a nation's entire carbon footprint should also include imported goods and services manufactured elsewhere. Dr Watson says: "In November 2006 the world's largest container ship, the Emma Maersk, sailed into Felixstowe Docks in the UK, laden with 11,000 containers full of Christmas goods. Is the CO2 emitted from the ...

If you mention 'Hong Kong stars' to most people back home they will of course mention two of Hong Kong's biggest and most recent exports, Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee (even though Lee was born in America) bringing Hong Kong cinema and music into the limelight even further. But none will know the plethora of stars way before these guys came on the scene, some of these include Zhang Guo Rong (Leslie Cheung) 张国荣, Zhou Ren Fa (Chow Yun-Fat) 周润发, Luo Wen 罗文 and Tan Yong Lin 谭咏麟 to name a few, but one who really touched the hearts in Hong Kong and China was Mei Yan Fang also known as Anita Mui. With a career that began in her early childhood, Anita Mui was the queen of Hong Kong's pop-music industry. After she won a singing contest in 1983, her life as a pop-singer began. In the early stage of her career her image was a bit tomboy and sexy and thus crowned the "Madonna of Hong Kong", some of her songs were considered too risqué, with one of them, "Bad Girl"...

China is facing a demographic crisis. It is heading towards becoming a nation of bachelors, with official statistics predicting as many as 40m single men by 2020. The shortage of women is due to a traditional preference for sons, combined with the effects of China's strict birth control policies. On Hainan Island, which has the worst gender imbalance in the country, A Jun dangles her baby girl on her hip as she waddles towards the village well. At 22, she is heavily pregnant with her second baby, and there is pressure on her to have a boy this time. "My husband wants a boy," she said. "If the second child's a girl, I'll have another. I want to have a boy too." So great is her desire for a boy, she is willing to risk a fine and the wrath of the government to have a forbidden third child. She lives in Pingling village, deep in the tropical hillside of Hainan island. It is a poverty-stricken collection of stone houses which depends on a few small plots of l...

BEIJING—There's plenty to read on China in the Western media. But my most recent visit convinces me that the place is changing way too quickly for any single snapshot to do it justice. China's transformation is everywhere—in skylines, in shop windows, and in conversations with Chinese citizens and officials of every description. A visit to Beijing generates two immediate impressions: growth continues at top speed; and, surprisingly, there's little sign of any real instability anywhere. We've seen the stats. The Chinese government has publicly acknowledged that the number of "mass group incidents," an official euphemism for public protests involving at least 50 people, grew from 8,700 in 1993 to nearly 87,000 in 2005. Even for a population of 1.3 billion, that's a lot of angry people. But the wide variety of anecdotal evidence I gathered here tells me that a broad majority of Chinese generally support their central government. That support is not unconditio...

Typhoon Krosa has hit China's southeast coast after more than 1 million people were evacuated, the government has announced. The storm, with winds of up to 78 mph, is moving northward, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said Krosa was the 16th typhoon to hit China this year. Taiwan's weather agency reports that Krosa had weakened to a tropical storm early today, but the wind speed reported by Xinhua would still be typhoon strength. More than 1 million people were evacuated from low-lying coastal areas, including more than 500,000 tourists who were at beach resorts for the National Day holiday week, Xinhua said. Krosa made landfall at about 3:30 pm (7:30am UK time) along the boundary of densely populated Zhejiang and Fujian provinces a day after killing four people in Taiwan, the China Meteorological Administration said on its website. There has been no immediate word of injuries or damage. Krosa killed four people on Taiwan on Saturday as it knocked out power to 2 mil...

This entry is supposed to focus on both the good and bad about China, but I am going to narrow my energies to the stuff I like. I say 'supposed to' because it is part of the Lost Laowai Group Writing Project on what people like and don't like about the country, but since I have never been one for rules, I have decided to ignore the negative. This is not to say that there is nothing bad—if anything there is too of that stuff to list in a column split between two topics. However, in a concerted effort to shed my grouchy image, I am trying to turn the Daily Tea Leaves into Super-Upbeat Harmonious Society Blog for a day. But just one. Arriving in China in 2001 was one of the weirdest moments of my life. Probably out of this experience of arriving and discovering how little I knew about the country, I developed a bit of an accepting attitude about the place. It’s not that I hadn’t done my homework before I arrived. I had read half a dozen books and memoirs about China before I ...

About 100 Chinese teachers are expected to arrive at state schools in the United Kingdom (yes, that haven of foreign language education) by next year, but schools which have already employed some of those teachers in their classrooms (which they described as "lovely") have already found problems, such as the following: "Their lack of familiarity with the English system of discipline, target setting etc is a problem." "They also tend to have different, perhaps unrealistic, expectations of pupils." "Concerns are expressed about Chinese teachers' abilities to manage pupils, particularly whole classes or where there is a tendency for students to be disruptive." "You need skilled teachers who can cope with the negativity." We don't know who these Chinese teachers are that are being sent to the UK and where they've taught in China to begin with, but we do know we shortened our life expectancy by at least a decade or two teaching r...

This is the trailer for a new British documentary which the Chinese embassy in London is apparently trying to stop Channel 4 from broadcasting, according to the Sunday Times newspaper article below. The Chinese embassy in London is trying to stop Channel 4 broadcasting a documentary about the trade in stolen children in China. The embassy is considering seeking an injunction to try to prevent China’s Stolen Children being shown on October 8. It has also been in touch with Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, and is expected to write to Channel 4’s board. The Chinese are angry that they are not being given an advance screening of the documentary, which claims that the trade in stolen children is widespread. C4 says it is not its policy to show such programmes in advance. However, the programme makers have provided the embassy with a three-page letter detailing their evidence. Professor Kevin Bales, a consultant to the United Nations programme on people trafficking, says in the film that ...

A store in my Beijing neighborhood shut down a few weeks ago, and it has left me wondering if I should be so happy about it. The place was sort of like a supermarket, except it had nothing good—at all. It is how I would have imagined shopping in East Germany to be. Each part of the store was a separate, independently operated section, equally as objectionable as the surrounding embarrassments. The shop keepers did not care much about the customers, and almost all of the products were mediocre. It’s the kind of place where you could stock up on dried sweet potatoes, green tea toothpaste, super cheap Chinese liquor, and nothing else. One day I went in and noticed that the shelves were more pathetically bare than normal. The place had always seemed pretty depressing anyway, with its dim lighting and sad selection. It was as if I was being punished for not overcoming my laziness and going somewhere better. However, the empty shelves took it to a new level, like a nuclear holocaust was comi...

Whenever someone criticizes China, particularly with regard to manners, a debate breaks out. Some people are quick to talk about ‘cultural differences’ and argue that Westerners should not impose their customs on another country. Other people take the opposite stance, saying that Chinese are ‘backwards’ (or sometimes worse). Typically someone throws out the ‘barbarian’ or ‘uncultured’ label, which personally seems like a lazy argument. Not all of the activities that people find offensive or at least objectionable fall into the same category. For example, urinating and spitting in public are serious health hazards, and can fairly be labeled as things that need changing. On the other hand, when I posted about people sleeping at work last week, one reader argued that it was much like a Spanish Siesta, and that foreign companies have the responsibility to come to terms with local culture. In this latter case, I would argue that it is not ‘cultural’ in that it is not sanctioned, nor accept...

Expected to be completed in spring of 2008, the construction of Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC) was reported on schedule. Named as the next tallest building in China, the SWFC has 102-storey with 492m-tall total, 300 rooms, and 377300 meter square of floor area. The SWFC is located at Lujiazui Financial and Trading Area in Pudong New District, Shanghai and will be used as office, hotel, museum, observation, and retail. The architect, KPF Associates employing glass extensively to this new highrise building. Shanghai Financial Tower Facts Construction of this monster finally began February 13th, 2003. Not implemented within two years, the project should have been canceled according to relevant regulations. However, because it is a project of huge investment and there have been no other suitable investors, the building remained, and in four years would finally rise up in Shanghai. The Consortium invested more than US$850 million for the project. Two sightseeing bridges were set on ...