January 5, 2004
The winter 2004 issue of the China Leadership Monitor somehow escaped my notice until today.
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Archive
January 8, 2004
I spent a couple of hours studying at the Center for Chinese Studies Annex today and borrowed the earliest China Pictorial that I could find, the third issue of 1974. I scanned in a few pages.
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January 9, 2004
Note that this is an issue of the Peking Review from 1968. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution started two years previous.
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January 12, 2004
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung...
pocket size
...
With red plastic cover
...
Get them while they're hot! (From the October 4th 1968 issue of the Peking Review, a special National Day issue.)
I've also scanned in a speech by Zhou Enlai to mark the holiday.
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January 14, 2004
What do Donald Rumsfeld, Celine Dione, Jacques Chirac and Cristina Aguilera have in common? They were all born in the Year of the Monkey.
I generally don't blog items that other China webloggers have already covered, but since I heard this on the radio today and I think it's fascinating, I'll mention that the NFL is planning a site in Mandarin for their Chinese fans. Crazy! Looks like they're playing catch up to the NBA.
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January 17, 2004
There is a nice Flash presentation on various aspects of China by Nicholas Kristof on his page at the New York Times, called A Maturing Power: Nicholas D Kristof in China.
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January 18, 2004
The Economist has updated its Big Mac Index with new numbers from January 15th of this year. China, once again, is at the bottom of the list as the most undervalued currency among those measured. Interestingly, in the newly debuting Starbuck's tall-latte index, China rises to parity with the dollar. (via Raygun Gothic)
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January 21, 2004
According to a survey released on the 15th by the China Internet Information Center (中国互联网络信息中心), 79 million Chinese are internet users. A year of steady growth has seen an increase of 34.5% over last year's count. This puts China second on the list of countries ranked by gross number of people online. Other interesting statistics:
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The number of people with computers has grown to almost 31 million, a 48.3% increase over last year. This shows the large number of people that use China's ubiquitous internet cafes to get online. This year's numbers, though, show the percentage of internet cafe users shrinking as families purchase computers for their homes and businesses.
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There are 595,990 registered domain names in the .cn TLD.
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The number of broadband users has increased by 7.6 million over the past six months.
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Outbound bandwidth has increased 1071 times over the level of 1997.
Interestingly, the last paragraph of the survey summary mentions that the CNNIC collected data on IPv6 adoption but doesn't say what the results were (the full results are available in a large pdf file). IPv6 is the next generation of internet addressing that promises to increase the number of IP addresses to an insanely huge amount, one that—theoretically—will never be exhausted. A Xinhua News Agency report on the survey points out that:
然而统计报告还显示，我国的IP地址资源近几年虽有较快增长，但仍不能完全满足中国互联网络运营单位发展的需要。随着我国网民人数的大幅增加，网络应用的逐步加强，IP地址发展与互联网络发展的不匹配性会显得更加突出。
In other words, the report says that China is using up IP addresses so quickly that the current availability will soon be insufficient; as the number of internet users increases, the issue of IP address availability will become more pressing. This is an interesting prospect for the growth of IPv6. The technology has been slow to catch on in the United States, which holds the rights to a very large number of IP addresses, and as such the need to upgrade has not been so urgent.
The Xinhua article also has a couple more interesting things to say. It spends a couple paragraphs pointing out the problem of the "digital divide" that exists within its borders; internet use and internet technology has developed much more rapidly and to a greater degre in coastal areas than in central and western China. It also goes on to point out that, percentage-wise, internet use in China is still less than a tenth of the level reached in the United States, 6.2% vs 63.2%. These last two notes give the article a sense of balance that is sometimes missing in Chinese reporting.
The China Digital News weblog covered this story, including a link to an article in English from the China Daily.
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January 22, 2004
Dashan talks about his New Year memories. (Realplayer required)
Hu Jintao wraps with Hebei villagers. (Likewise)
As the top man in China placed a lump of meat into a flour wrapper, he emphasized the main message of his year-old administration: The government's primary responsibility is the people's welfare, especially in poor areas.
"That, after all, is socialism," Hu said, as a man in a cloth cap nodded. A woman nearby churned out more flour wrappers with a wooden rolling pin.
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January 24, 2004
China's Leaders Manage Class Conflict Carefully:
Guangdong has grown by more than 10 percent annually for the past decade. But its factory workers, mostly migrants from the interior, earn no more today than they did in 1993, several Chinese studies have found. The average wage of $50 to $70 a month also buys less today than it did in the early 1990's, meaning workers are losing ground even as China enjoys one of the longest and most robust expansions in modern history.
I would not cast judgement before then, but I would be curious to read the studies that this article refers to.
This afternoon I went through about 100 backlogged e-mails from the Oriental List (a great China travel e-mail listserve), and the prize link was a page with pictures of a southern Chinese wedding.
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January 26, 2004
There's a great series of posts on the Lunar New Year in China at Voluntarily in China, starting with "Spring festival less festive this year." This is his first year as part of a Chinese family, and he has carefully documented the Chinese New Year experience, including lots of photographs. When I was in China, I took advantage of the vacation time by travelling and spent the CNY in Hong Kong, so I'm very interested in what happens in in real China
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I'm not real clear on the format I should use to post Chinese articles, if I'm going to be doing that more consistently. I'll try the usual style first:
(rough translation)
European Union Initiates Discussion Over Lifting the Ban on Sales to the Chinese Military
On the afternoon of the 26th, a meeting of European Union foreign ministers discussed lifting the current ban on arms sales to the Chinese military. Furthermore, a subcommittee of permanent representatives, and a group of political and security affairs representatives were commissioned to deliberate on the matter.
More info at the New York Times, France Makes Headway in Push to Permit Arms Sales to China. The leader in this movement is France, althought it can't exactly be called a leader because nobody else is following its lead. Other bigwigs in the EU like Germany and Britain have expressed open disagreement. This year, France is officially celebrating its relationship with China with cultural events, etc; we'll see if this was more than just a friendly gesture to mark Chinese president Hu Jintao's visit to Paris.
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January 27, 2004
The China Study Group:
Members of the CSG support the broad goals of the Chinese revolution that triumphed in 1949, and seek to stimulate knowledge and debate regarding its achievements and limitations, as well as to offer a critical perspective of the radical changes that have occurred in China over the past 25 years and an ongoing analysis of its role in the world today.
Theirs is an interesting statement; the website has lots of good material with an academic bent. JJ's blog seems worth following.
Peasant ballads (from Maoflag.net):
这达标、那达标，都要农民掏腰包；
这大办、那大办，都是农民血和汗。
Fons Tuinstra writes about Dr Zhao Jimin's CCS noon lecture today. If I had known he was still in Ann Arbor... Fons, I was the guy nodding off in the back row, near the refreshments table.
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January 31, 2004
Stephen Frost has a January roundup of Chinese labor-related news items.
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