Results tagged “environment”

China Green has released another great look at some of the environmental problems plaguing this country. This time around, we head to the Tibetan plateau's Anyemaqen mountain range and the effects of climate change there. As explained on their website:

• Once seen as spies, Taiwan eases China media curbs [Reuters] "Taiwan has relaxed rules for Chinese media, long regarded as spy organizations for the Communist government, as relations warm between the two long-time political rivals, officials said on Wednesday. Effective immediately, Chinese media, which include state-run giants such as Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television, can increase staff from two to five people apiece and travel to any part of Taiwan or its outlying islands, officials said."
• Chengdu traffic gives rise to new profession: taxi chasing [GoChengdoo] "We've written before about how frustrating catching a taxi in Chengdu has become in the last few years. And although 800 cabs were allegedly added to Chengdu's streets last month, it doesn't seem to be getting any easier. But now help is on the way, in the form of a "chubby figure" who chases down cabs for passengers, collecting 2 RMB each time."
• In modern China, no place for totalitarian anthems [China Media Project] "How should we best understand the extravagance that marked China’s recent National Day celebrations? In the wake of the pomp and circumstance, a good friend of mine summed it up with a single phrase: “Four portraits and four anthems.” By portraits he was referring of course to the four massive portraits of state leaders - Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao - that gazed over the celebration."

• China's 8.9% Growth? No Way [Forbes]"On Oct. 22, Beijing announced that gross domestic product grew by 8.9% in the third quarter of 2009 compared with the corresponding period last year. The National Bureau of Statistics also reported that growth for the first three quarters was up 7.7%. How could it not have been? Since last November, Beijing has spent perhaps as much as $900 billion-from its own funds as well as those of the larger state banks-to jump start its $4.3 trillion economy. No government can disburse that amount of cash without creating some economic activity."
• China's push for oil in Gulf of Mexico puts U.S. in awkward spot [LA Times]"China's push to enter U.S. turf comes four years after CNOOC's $18.5-billion bid to buy Unocal Corp. was scuttled by Congress on national security grounds. The El Segundo oil firm eventually merged with Chevron Corp. of San Ramon. Whether CNOOC's second attempt to lock up U.S. petroleum assets will trigger a similar political backlash remains to be seen. The sour U.S. economy and the need for Washington and Beijing to cooperate on potentially larger issues could mute any outcry."
• The story of China Incorporated [China Daily] "Twenty-five years ago, Megatrends was a must-read for any Chinese who was keen to know about the world - not just the world as it was, but the world that would be. And that included higher officials who were unaccustomed to foreign theorizing other than that by Marx and Lenin. By some estimate, the book sold some 20 million copies in China. The original English version was published two years earlier, in 1982, and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. Last month, John Naisbitt, the author of Megatrends, came out with China's Megatrends. This time, the Chinese edition debuted before the English original."
• Voices of Power Transcript: Chris Lu [Washington Post] "Chris Lu has known President Obama since they attended Harvard Law School together, but they cemented their friendship when Obama hired him in 2004 for his Senate staff. He's the Cabinet secretary — a title that belies an intense assignment as chief intermediary between the White House and the federal agencies. On a daily basis, his job is not only to convey the president's views and expectations to all the department heads and keep them on message, but also to help them resolve their issues with the White House. The son of Chinese immigrants, Lu is one of the highest-ranking Asian Americans in the administration. "
• A special report on China and America: : The price of cleanliness [The Economist] "The Beijing authorities built Taiyanggong to impress the world in the run-up to the Olympic games which opened in the city in August 2008—on the same day that America opened a new embassy in Beijing (heated, American officials say proudly, by Taiyanggong). Some 5,000 workers toiled night and day to deliver on the Chinese government’s promise to provide an environmentally friendly power source for the games. Taiyanggong was connected to the grid with nearly eight months to spare…Now the power station’s owners, led by a municipal state-owned company, are struggling to make it work financially. "
• Mandarin Eclipses Cantonese, Changing the Sound of Chinatown [NYTimes] "He grew up playing in the narrow, crowded streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown. He has lived and worked there for all his 61 years. But as Wee Wong walks the neighborhood these days, he cannot understand half the Chinese conversations he hears. Cantonese, a dialect from southern China that has dominated the Chinatowns of North America for decades, is being rapidly swept aside by Mandarin, the national language of China and the lingua franca of most of the latest Chinese immigrants."
  Continue reading "Todays links: China's Megatrends, Chris Lu, and Taiyanggong"

• Looking for a good laugh this week? Check out ChopSchticks Comedy this Thursday and Friday. Headlined by Dennis Regan (appearances on The Tonight Show and David Letterman) and opening by Ryan Conner this show at Number 5 Bistro promises a hilarious night out. [City Weekend]
• Also appearing in Shanghai is New Zealand comedian Ray Bon Kan (yes, he's bffs with Flight of the Conchords). He'll be at Malones on Thursday at 8pm. Figures one of the few times Shanghai has a bunch of comedians play, they force you to choose between them. [Shanghai Talk]
• Pollution levels were (shockingly) higher than usual, according to recent reports. Apparently for the past 3 days we have experienced poorer air quality than any other time of the year and yet, oddly enough, it doesn't seem to be bothering people like pollution normally does. Perhaps we're all just used to it by now? [Shanghai Daily]

It's finally here! On October 31, the bridge and tunnel linking Chongming Island to Shanghai will open. For all the 700,000 residents of Chongming and those of us mainland folks who venture there, we'll no longer have to rely on the iffy ferry service. Instead, one can get to Chongming from Pudong in just 30 minutes.

Naturally, we think that Shanghai beats Beijing in the better city competition, but here's some extra reasons why. The UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) has found Shanghai's air quality to be far better than Beijing's, an auspicious ruling ahead of the Expo. The blue sky index shows that Beijing's levels of PM10 particles are twice as high as Shanghai's.

Despite the low pay, it seems that there's nothing that Chinese people admire more than their teachers. According to a recent survey by the Shanghai Association for Science and Technology, teaching ranked as the most widely admired profession, followed by scientists and doctors. About 1,500 adults from ages 18 to 69 were polled in a survey about the most desirable jobs for the next generation. Thanks perhaps to all the news of corruption crackdowns, government official ranked only fourth on the list and trailed the top three by a long shot. Not mentioned was who exactly these 1,500 adults were - Urban professionals? Country farmers? Migrant workers? We would think that the various income levels would have all their own ideas of what they want for their children. Source: CRI English Photo from China Daily

So former British PM Tony Blair and Chinese kung fu superstar Jet Li have teamed up to form a dynamic duo of putting solar panel lights in villages around China (and one day, the world!).

With all the recent talk about pollution and children being poisoned, we thought it'd be good to take a quick look at a documentary from 1992 about Da Zhu Xian, a remote county in Sichuan Province.

China has always attached great importance to climate change and other countries should make more efforts to jointly protect the earth, Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo said in L'Aquila, Italy on Thursday.

Beijing, like many Chinese cities, has not what we would ever dare call excellent air. So for the past several months, the US embassy in Beijing has been posting hourly updates on their measurements of air quality in the 'Jing via Twitter feed. Set up out of concern for the health of the embassy staff, the reports range from "good" to "very unhealthy" based on the levels of airborne pollutants (particles) that can enter a person's body.

@timrider: "Save elevator/qi che power with roof based building2building ziplines! Super quick commute & likely reduced death defiance!" Sure it's not the most practical, but it's a fun thought and it caused us to have a good laugh. If there's anything we WOULD love to do to save the environment, it'd be to act like an urban Tarzan. @timrider wins a night at URBN, China's only eco-friendly hotel, located in the heart of Jing'an. The runner ups: @leirda with "mass broadcast of Captain Planet on public transport TVs to begin the recruitment of 1.3 billion planeteers. Go Planet!" (We loved Captain Planet as kids) and @cedric_c with "Save tons of CO2/month forbidding all media besides Shanghaiist. Less CO2, Greener city, only 1 media to spend green $ for ads." (because we're flattered).

The Ministry of Environmental Protection recently released a summary of its “State of the Environment” report, and if you haven't read it yet, it's even more exciting than the last Twilight book. To read the original MEP report in Chinese, it's over here.

From Michael Zhao of China Green:

Southeastern Tibet’s vast “sea of forests” contains one-seventh of all the timber reserves in China. In 1997, China banned harvesting in the region and created the Four Great Rivers Nature Preserve, in order to protect the upper watersheds of four of Asia’s greatest rivers: the Yangtze, Salween, Mekong and Irrawaddy. Together, these rivers serve nine countries and 20 percent of the world’s population.

Multimedia enterprise China Green has been using some very well produced short films to document China's ongoing environmental issues. In this one, they take a look at Sohota Electric, a small Guangdong firm that has been making a big profit helping the country's various giants (including CCTV) retrofit their offices to become energy efficient. Considering that reports by China’s Ministry of Construction have deemed all buildings constructed before 2000 energy inefficient, it looks like Sohota will have a lot of work on their hands in the near future.

This is probably not the most obvious collaboration but Zapata’s is hosting - for one special night only - the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC), with all proceeds going towards Shanghai Roots and Shoots.

• Child sex scandal involves teachers, officials [Shanghai Daily] "Eight people, including six government officials and teachers, will go on trial for their involvement in a child prostitution scandal affecting a dozen primary and middle school students in southwest China. The Guizhou police launched an investigation after receiving a complaint on August 15 last year from a mother who said her 13-year-old daughter, Li Yu, had been raped after being duped by a classmate, Wang Qing, in Xishui County. The investigation then uncovered a conspiracy which saw girl students being forced into prostitution."
• Mainland tourist apologizes for graffiti in Taiwan under public pressure [Xinhua] "A Chinese mainland tourist who has been lambasted on the Internet for carving his name on a rock face in a Taiwan scenic area apologized to the public on Thursday for his misbehavior. Zhao Genda, a 63-year-old pensioner from Changzhou City, Jiangsu Province, gained instant notoriety after Taiwan TV reported that he carved his name and that of his hometown on the rock face at Taipei Yeliu Geopark on Friday."
• Can China be green by 2020? [BBC] "China's unprecedented economic growth over the past 30 years has come at a huge cost to the environment. The damage has not only been to the air the Chinese breath or the water in their rivers, but also to its reputation across the world. But there are signs that China may now be serious about tackling pollution to prove to the world that it can develop while causing less damage to the environment."

The Boston Globe has compiled a bunch of much prettier pictures of Earth Hour around the world, including a picture of the banks of the Huangpu River as seen from the Bund. The fun thing about this gallery is that when you click on the pictures, they fades into what the area looked like during the Earth Hour. We realized we have to apologize to the Aurora building - it did in fact turn its lights out. Perhaps the picture by the Earth Hour building was just taken a tad too early. Sorry, Aurora building!

While the Chinese government may not have been quite as turned on about Earth Hour as we may have initially hoped, Shanghai at least gave the movement - which involves turning everything (you can) off for one hour every last Saturday in March - a good try. It switched off the lights at the iconic Pearl Tower and was supported by the ICBC building and several prominent Lujiazui hotels.

Sure, you could always just stay at home tonight, turn out your lights at exactly 8:30pm and then wait around an hour before you declare yourself a good environmental citizen and go back to your regular life - or you could recognize the whole movement for what it really is: a way to feel a part of something bigger than yourself with like-minded people... and an excuse to get drunk in the dark! So here's a couple places to chug a few in the name of Mother Gaia.

• Primary school students expelled for gambling ring in Guangdong [Zhongnanhai] "There were many cars waiting outside the Huadong (Dongguan, Guangdong Province) Senior High School gate over the last two days. Parents were waiting to take their kids back home, permanently. Over a hundred students in grades one and two have been involved in basketball gambling. All of them have been expelled from school."
• Saint Laurent Chinese Qing Bronzes Fetch $40 Million [Bloomberg] "Both made 15.7 million euros with fees, or 14 million euros at hammer price. The sculptures had been expected to fetch about 8 million euros each, said Christie’s. They were bought by Thomas Seydoux, Christie’s international co-head of Impressionist and modern art, taking instructions over the telephone."
• China keeps wary eye on displaced migrant workers [International Herald Tribune] "Although the government has not released updated information about rural unrest, officials have been strategizing about how best to keep large protests and riots from spreading, should the dispossessed grow unruly. This week, more than 3,000 public security directors from across the country are gathering in the capital to learn how to neutralize rallies and strikes before they blossom into so-called 'mass incidents.' At a meeting of the Chinese cabinet last month, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told government leaders they should prepare for rough times ahead. 'The country's employment situation is extremely grim,' he said."

Shanghai Scrap has a great analysis of the differences in mentality between recycling in China and recycling in the West. While in Europe and North America recycling is a moral act done almost as a penance for overconsumption, in the developing world it's done because it's economical.

Photojournalist Chua Chin Hon has amassed an impressive collection of photographs charting the transformation caused by the Three Gorges Dam project, soon to be showing at Southern Barbarian. The pictures, taken over repeated visits to the area in the last five years, document historic townships being submerged and new communities taking their place.

• About 30,000 cleaners swept up 1,200 tonnes of fireworks debris left over from Sunday night's big celebrations.
• Originally scheduled for launch in August 2008, the much-touted luxury hotel Jumeirah HanTang Xintiandi Shanghai, will now be open for business sometime this year.
• Chinese government officials have denied U.S. Treasury secretary nominee Timothy Geithner's allegations that China is manipulating its currency.

Michael Zhao of the New York-based Asia Society emailed us with this 3-min trailer video introducing their new project China Green and informs us:

As the source of most of the major river systems in Asia from China to Pakistan, including the Yellow, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Indus, the Tibetan Plateau has become an epicenter of crisis. With the retreating of its glaciers - what glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has called the "fresh water bank account" of Asia - rivers and lakes have started running lower, pastures have become drier, deserts larger, weather patterns more unpredictable. Indeed, the whole ecosystem of the Tibetan Plateau and its hinterland are now slipping toward a catastrophic environmental disaster which will have continental implications far beyond the plateau itself.

Wang Chen: China Registers Historic Progress in Human Rights [Xinhua]

Youku Buzz informs us that some entrepreneurial street vendors in Changsha, Hunan, are now selling fresh air from places like Inner Mongolia and Yangshuo at the really affordable rate of RMB50 per bottle.

"At least three people have been killed and 18 more are missing after the collapse of a half-built tunnel in Hangzhou in eastern China."

A new report commissioned by Greenpeace, the Energy Foundation and the WWF estimates that the environmental and social costs of China's coal usage hit RMB1.7 trillion last year, or about 7.1% of the country's GDP. Speaking on the report, Yang Ailun, Greenpeace's climate and energy campaign manager, urged the government to recognize “the true cost of coal [and] create incentives to develop cleaner, sustainable energy sources."

As we told you earlier, mysterious fumes that turned out to be caused by leaking herbicide, spread through Shanghai earlier this month, sending two women to hospital. The source of it was found to be three hundred kilograms of liquid herbicide, that leaked from a valve at the Shanghai Pesticide Factory. According to Shanghai Daily nine people from the factory including the general manager, have been fired because of this incident. The paper also notes that during the investigation of this case "the Shanghai Commission of Safety Production found 82 unqualified production units, including some plants that are producing dangerous chemicals".