Today's Links: Angry Hong Kong journalists, high-speed railway plans and Thomas Friedman is really, really stupid

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  • Black is White, White is Black [Asia Sentinel] "“Even now I still cannot calm down. Only rage, rage and rage. Only extreme (expletive) rage! I can never imagine how a government, a great nation, which has more or less squeezed itself in on the international stage, and which has earned a bit of status in the international community, can be so shameless, knavish, lawless, unable to tell right from wrong, black from white, turning a victim into an accused, twisting facts and twisting truths - how can such a nation and motherland be so thick-skinned as to tell Hong Kong people to be patriotic?"
  • China unveils high-speed railways [BBC] "China has announced plans to build 42 new high-speed railway lines over the next three years. In a breakthrough, China has developed trains that can run on both high-speed and normal lines, said railway official Zhang Shuguang. A 500km/h train will be tested by the end of next year, Mr Zhang said. China will have added 13,000km of high-speed lines by 2012, shortening journey times considerably for the expected seven billion annual passengers."
  • Thomas Friedman Demands Communist Revolution [Gawker] "Flat-earther Times columnist Thomas Friedman thinks we should probably "outsource" our form of government to China, where they have streamlined the whole process by eliminating the bit where idiots "vote." No, seriously, he is outright saying that the autocratic one-party Chinese government is superior to our own. There is no equivocation in this line: "There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today." And why are things better in China? Because the current "reasonably enlightened group of people" in charge of China, at the moment, can just impose "politically difficult but critically important policies" like raising gas prices to encourage clean power investment and so on."
  • China tip-off 'sparked' fighting [Al Jazeera] "A senior Myanmar official has said that last month's clashes in the northeast of the country were sparked after a Beijing tipped them off about the location of an illegal arms factory. Up to 30,000 people fled across the border from Kokang into northern China during the fighting which followed the raid on the arms factory in the mainly ethnic Chinese region."
  • Google’s Joint Leadership Model May Slow China Gains [Bloomberg] "Google Inc. founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page conquered the U.S. Internet industry by forming a triumvirate with Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt. Sharing power may not work in the world’s biggest market: China. The owner of the world’s most popular Internet-search engine last week named two people to replace Kai-Fu Lee, who resigned as president of its China operations to run a $115 million venture-capital firm. Boon-Lock Yeo will oversee engineering and John Liu sales."
  • Optimism Over China's Green Technology Market [Wall Street Journal] "A group of Western companies says it can foresee a $500 billion to $1 trillion market annually for clean technology in China, according to a report published Thursday meant to highlight how a big new industry might develop in the world's most populous nation. The China Greentech Report 2009 outlines over 300 clean energy, construction, transport, water and other businesses that might realistically open in China. The meaty, data-packed report was put together by a group calling itself China Greentech Initiative, made up of more than 80 predominantly large Western companies and organizations with interests in the environmental sector."
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By Elaine Chow in on September 10, 2009 8:00 PM Comments 2 Likes Likes

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