February 2, 2004
According to the China Daily and a survey by The [China?] Consumers' Association (CCA), Farmers spend more on education:
Wang Zailan, in her 40s, is an illiterate housewife in Lianfeng, Shizhu County
in Southwest China's Chongqing Province.
A black and white TV set is the only household electrical appliances her
family owns. Her elder son is now at university and the youngest has just
graduated from junior middle school.
To ensure the children's education, the family has accumulated a debt of
10,000 yuan (US$1,200).
So the question becomes, who does she owe the debt to? Will she be able to pay it back? How many farmers have accumulated such a large debt? At what rate will they default? Should the government be subsidizing this type of expenses?
In other news, the Tehran Times reports that US government officials applied pressure to Chinese oil companies not to pursue oil exploration in Iran. No Change in Iran's Oil Field Bidding: Chinese Oil Giant:
The United States believes that the oil deals would thwart its attempts to quash Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program through economic sanctions.
"The U.S. embassy in China has contacted Sinopec about our plans in Iran, but we have told them that we will continue with all of our efforts there," the Dow Jones News Agency has reported, citing an unnamed Sinopec official.
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February 4, 2004
Comment: Decision leaves loophole for rich criminals:
Gu Yibing, a civil servant in Jiangsu Province of East China: The rich in China have accumulated their wealth by various means. Many have reached their current status because they were quick to seize good opportunities or willing to work hard.
At the beginning of their business, it was almost inevitable for them to take advantage of the special environment when the planned economy was transforming into a market economy. Crimes like tax evasion and manufacturing fake products were commonplace.
This is how the "original sin" of some of these business owners blossomed.
国务院电视电话会：严格控制部分行业过度投资: China's State Council calls for strictly censoring over-investment in construction related industries (by state-owned entities). Sounds like they're not real serious about it, the article goes on to relay several other messages by the minister. This may, however, be a sign that the government is getting wise to the construction industry's part in the current economic bubble.
Citibank launches credit card for Chinese:
Plans to develop a consumer credit market on the mainland face serious hurdles - chief among them the lack of a national bank clearing system and a paucity of credit records. Local banks are already being burned by delinquent home and auto loans.
But Prince said Citigroup did not view the fast expansion of China's credit market as a "bubble" similar to South Korea's woes with runaway personal credit card debt. Citibank's risk management policies should prevent similar problems here, he said.
Even I remember just a few years ago when South Korea was the hot new market for credit cards.
This 21st-Century Japan, More Contented Than Driven:
There is strong nostalgia nowadays for the Edo Period, the feudal era preceding the last century and a half of rapid change. While the Edo Period had many social problems, people are now remembering it as a time of stability and great cultural vitality.
"People want to return to an era where life was perceived to be more enjoyable," Mr. Sekizawa said.
The feeling is noticeably strong among the young. If the icon of the 1980's was the "salaryman" who sacrificed his private life for his company, today's icon is the "freeter" — the young Japanese who take odd jobs to make just enough money to enjoy their personal interests or choose their way of life. The stress of competing inside Japan, let alone as part of a country competing against a visibly, and to some, frighteningly, hungry China, is furthest from their minds.
A nice article about choosing to withdraw from the rat race.
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February 6, 2004
Ridiculously Large Chinese Numbers:
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兆
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Zhao4
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Trillion
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1,000,000,000,000
|
|
京
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Jing1
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Ten Quadrillion
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10,000,000,000,000,000
|
|
垓
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Gai1
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Hundred Quintillion
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100,000,000,000,000,000,000
|
Blind Shaft:
BLIND SHAFT tells the story of two itinerant miners (Song Jinming and Tang Chaoyang) who risk their lives under dangerous working conditions and develop questionable morals in order to survive.
In the dark caves of one of the many illegal Chinese coal mines, Song and Tang murder a co-worker whom they have convinced to pose as Tang's brother. By forcing the mine's collapse upon their deceased colleague, and thereby making his death seem accidental, Tang and Song use their colleague's death to extort money from the mine's management. Pressured to cover up an accident which they believe to be the result of improper working conditions, the mine's owners give in to the two workers' blackmailing.
There is a relevant article in the New York Times: "Descending Into the Pit of Humanity"; and the NYT review. It will be playing at the Detroit Institute of Arts on March 16th. I plan to go. (via Asian Labor News)
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February 11, 2004
On NPR this morning there was a story about new soldiers being moved to Iraq to replace the ones coming home, and the reporter interviewed a young husband and wife who had been married less than a year, asking them about the uncertainty of being apart. I think in China it's a little more romantic to be a soldier's wife. From the 军嫂之家 (Home of the Soldier's Wife) page at the PLA Daily website:
“想做军嫂”栏目是为那些想寻找军人为伴侣的人士构建的一座桥梁，希望各位朋友认真负责地填写个人资料。
The "Wish to be a Soldier's Wife" message board was set up to be a bridge for those seeking a military spouse. Please be responsible in filling in your data.
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February 17, 2004
Voluntarily in China took pictures of Chinese New Year door decoration at a local Christian church. Neat.
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February 18, 2004
Changes in spare-time reading for Chinese University students in 50 years:
A survey named "The book that impressed you most during 1985 to 1989" indicated that Jin Yong's works ranked the second and works of Qiong Yao and San Mao the sixth. The mature operation mechanism of light literature in Hong Kong and Taiwan made such literature popular and thriving in the Chinese mainland.
I've been wading through a Jin Yong novel for the past week. I'd say it's high intermediate level. Good stuff. The grad library here at UMich has a decent collection of pulp fiction of the kung fu genre, in both simplified and traditional. And of course, most of it can also be found on the net, which I prefer to download and print double-spaced for note-taking.
There is a discussion of Chinese demographic timebombs at Daniel Drezner's weblog, from which I learned a few things.
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February 20, 2004
In the latest of the Journal of Asian Studies, David Ludden reflects on the issue's articles in this way:
these articles both dovetail nicely with my concern for areas outside the reach of territorial authority or, in the case of Yunnan, partly in and partly out, which is the case for much of northeastern South Asia as well through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The vast interior mountain-valley-river-forest region that includes Yunnan could be conceptualized by both authors usefully as not lying essentially inside China at all but partly inside China and partly in wider geographies that the trade routes, religious routes, ethnic relations, linguistic evidence, and so on—not to mention opium itself and all of the smuggling—link to Central, South, West, and Southeast Asia. This is a wonderful area for doing connective work across “other geographies” than national states provide.
This will be a good way to approach the book we're reading this week for James Lee's class, an as-yet-unpublished work by David Bello (also author of one of the JAS articles) on inland opium trade in XVIII and XIX century Asia.
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