Last week Chinese authorities rescued 500 people–many of them children–from brick factories in Shanxi. The workers had been sold to these kilns by unscrupulous labor agencies and then kept there against their will as slaves, working 18 hours a day under the constant threat of physical abuse. All the while, authorities in the province turned [...]
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Following up on a piece that I posted over at The Peking Duck, US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), commissioned by Congress in 2000, [...] UPI reports: “Five South Korean female short track players raised signs reading, “Mount Paekdu is our (Korean) territory” during an awards ceremony Wednesday.” The incident is the latest in a series of back and forth sniping between China and Korea in a variety of media including competing op-ed pieces, ‘scholarly’ articles, and even teledramas over [...] After this week’s earthquake off the coast of Taiwan, bloggers and the media reported on the internet outages/slowdowns between the PRC and the rest of the world. The funniest take on the subject has to be from Ryan’s (“The Humanaught”) Life in Suzhou Blog: Apparently, and this is from the not-too-creditable “customer service” representative at CT, [...] I’ve tried to stay out of the fray on the current political dispute in Taiwan. First, I’ve never been there. Second, there are bloggers out there far more in touch with the state of affairs in Taipei than I am. But yesterday on CDT, I read a Financial Times piece on Taiwan president Chen Shui-bian’s plans [...] Nearly six centuries after Zheng He first reached the Horn of Africa, China once again turns its attentions to the African continent. The official [...] In a stunning move, an appeals court has overturned the guilty verdict of activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng. Chen was sentenced to four years in prison this past summer after launching a crusade against the forced sterilization of peasant women. Local officials had ordered the sterilizations as well as forced abortions in an effort to [...] NYT reports this morning that the Hu/Zeng crime fighting dynamic duo have turned their sites on Beijing–and Standing Committee Member, Beijing party secretary, and Jiang Zemin ally Jia Qinglin could become the first member of that elite club to be purged for corruption since the CCP took power in 1949. Interesting take by Jim Yardley in today’s NYT on the recent corruption purges and crackdowns in the PRC. Yardley argues that the endemic nature of corruption in China makes fighting corrupt practices difficult–if not impossible–without serious structural reforms.
In an economic boom gilded with excess and profiteering, official corruption is so widespread, and [...] Some random notes courtesy of the History News Network: A recent study shows important DNA and linguistic links between the native peoples of Taiwan and those of the Pacific Islands. “The 12 original tribes of Taiwan are Austronesian by language and culture, as are the great majority of the island peoples who settled the Pacific islands. Since [...] Robert Kaplan reviews the possible scenarios of a DPRK collapse (violent or not) in this month’s issue of The Atlantic Online. (“When North Korea Falls” via Arts and Letters Daily) Kaplan argues that in the event of a DPRK implosion, the real winner, out of all the possible players, might just be Beijing. “Although Japan’s proximity [...] Woke up this morning to find my fantasy football team is 4-1 and the Korean peninsula has officially gone nuclear. As Wu Ming pointed out in a comment to my most recent post, the US is likely to get more panicky than the South Koreans with Japan a close second. If Shinzo Abe needed some [...] In the news on Wednesday: The French government is seriously considering a ban on smoking in public places–including restaurants and bars–to take effect as early as next year. Some French seem resigned to it, others are annoyed that they won’t be able to continue their unbridled support for large, greedy, American tobacco corporations. (Je deteste le capitalisme [...] Via CDT, the Boston Globe has an article today on a petition signed by over fifty scholars and activists calling for a stop to the persecution of human rights activists in China. “The Sept. 29 open letter posted on the Web site of the New York-based Human Rights Watch organization chiefly bore the signatures of some 40 [...] Some quick thoughts as I fly from New England to California this morning. In the Times Literary Supplement is a fascinating review of Francis Fukuyama’s new book After the Neocons. (“Doomed International” TLS 09/20/06, thanks to Arts and Culture Daily for the link) Whether you love him, loathe him, used to loathe him and now love [...] |
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