Results tagged “presidenthujintao”

PLUS LEE KUAN YEW AND HIS ROLE IN SINO-SINGAPORE RELATIONS The last week has seen top leaders zipping between China and Singapore to cement ties and sign new deals. Let's take you through the high-profile visits one by one before diving deeper into more detail (Warning: Long article!): Goh Chok Tong visits new Shanghai party chief and the Singapore-Suzhou Industrial Park Last week, Singapore's Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong swung by Shanghai to visit her...

The video includes two images of Kevin Rudd cleverly photoshopped into old communist propaganda posters (yes, the type that you'd find in the Dongtai Lu antique market), and classic lines among the subtitles (which are supposed to the translation for the rubbish Chinese voiceovers) include "Rudd impress and frighten Australian person with his earnestness offensive," and "He unnerve decrepit Howard by deploying clever principle of 'similar difference'. Leader Rudd declares swift and violent Education Revolution." Ingenious. And as the Sydney Morning Herald notes, political parties with their multi-million dollar advertising budgets have a thing or two to learn from guerilla tactics such as these.

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China(ICBC), the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, is buying 20 percent of South Africa’s Standard Bank Group Ltd. Standard Bank is based in Johannesburg and has branches in 18 African nations. The USD $5.5 billion price tag marks the most expensive overseas investment by a Chinese firm to date. Earlier in the week, CITIC Securities, also a state owned company, swapped USD $1 billion worth of equities with Bear Stearns. Both tie-ups are just the latest examples of corporate China’s aggressive international merger and acquisition binge, started back in 2004 when Lenovo bought IBM’s PC business.

The Chinese Communist Party, the world's largest political party with some 64 million members opened its 17th Party Congress yesterday. With over 2,200 delegates from all over the nation, the congress was opened by parliament chief Wu Bangguo with the national anthem, followed by a moment of silence marked for Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and other "martyrs of the revolution" before President Hu Jintao began addressing the party. A great sense of expectation there as you can see on the video now that the party has just begun, but as the days go by, we will no doubt see more and more of these scenes instead.

China issued a sweeping denunciation of Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian on Thursday, accusing him of stirring animosity between the sides to divert attention from his personal scandals.

With the dust now settled on last week's APEC summit in Australia, we came on a juicy tidbit of news that either didn't get much mileage in the Chinese press or escaped the news that we read. Shanghaiist reader Fergus Ryan filled us in:

Ever thought of what you're doing to offset your carbon footprint? This Saturday, instead of driving your car or taking a taxi, why don't you try taking public transport, cycling or walking instead? Residents will be asked to avoid driving private cars within the Inner Ring Road, and while compliance is not mandatory, driving will be banned outright in some areas.

... and we thought Xinhua's mistake of illustrating a story on the causes of the debilitating disease multiple sclerosis with an X-ray photo of Homer Simpson's brain was bad!

Ching Cheong, the Hong Kong journalist who was chief China correspondent for the Singapore-based Straits Times, is ailing in prison somewhere in the Guangdong province right now. On 22 April 2005, Ching was apprehended by Chinese security agents in Guangzhou, where he was to meet a source who had promised to give him a copy of a politically sensitive manuscript on former premier Zhao Ziyang. It took one and a half years before he was eventually prosecuted (for spying on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency and for divulging state secrets) and sentenced to five years in prison.

Hu in new bid to tighten screws on rival faction, by Chua Chin Hon of the Straits Times:

One has died from an undisclosed illness while another is already behind bars on corruption charges. But there appears to be no let-up in Chinese President Hu Jintao's attempts to put the squeeze on members of the rival Shanghai faction, a group of senior leaders and officials allied with his predecessor Jiang Zemin.

Continue reading "Snippets: The Shanghai faction, counterfeit and corruption"

See anything newsworthy? Leave us a tip on the Shanghaiist Contribute Page!

Editor's Note: Sorry, forgot to send these out last night in our rush to get to the Sonic Youth show.

• Leading Chinese Enviro Activist Detained
  "In the meantime,here, from today’s Wall Street Journal, is another thing all those green minded local officials are doing: locking up irksome environmental activists"
• China to keep 2008 Olympics 'dry'
  "Beijing will use aircraft, missiles and cannons in what could amount to a massive umbrella over the city to keep athletes dry during next year's Olympics, state media reported on Friday."
• U.S. knew about China's anti-satellite test, chose not to act, says N.Y. Times
  "U.S. intelligence knew about preparations for January's test in China of an anti-satellite weapon but the U.S. government chose not to intervene because of insufficient leverage with Beijing, The New York Times reported on its Web site Sunday."
• Speeding, Overloading Blamed for Road Tragedy
  "The guardrails on each side of the bridge were only ten centimeters in height, far lower than the minimum height of 46 cm required by law, Li Yizhong, Minister of the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS), said at the scene of the accident."
• Beijing to destroy its oldest Peking Opera house
  "The Guanghe Theatre, which sits in Beijing's historic Qianmen quarter, will meet the wrecking ball, making way for the capital's "remorseless" onslaught of modernisation, Xinhua news agency reported."
• Foreign banks offer tea,insurance to lure Chinese
  "For those Chinese rich enough to open an 80,000 yuan ($10,350) account, Citigroup Inc and Standard Chartered are now promising an alternative to the long queues at China's big state lenders."
• Doing business in China: Popular Shanghai restaurant falls prey to joint venture dispute
  "The lights at Renren Restaurant now are dim all the time. The once thriving cafe has fallen prey to a dispute between the Hong Kong company represented by Ho, a Canadian citizen, and its mainland Chinese partners, who want him out."
• Top 40 blogs according to Zhuaxia stats
  Chinese blogs. Keso is No. 1.
• China delays climate change plan indefinitely
  "China has delayed indefinitely its national 'action plan' on climate change, which was due to be released on Monday after exhaustive consultations among ministries in Beijing and provincial and local governments."
• Shanghai signboards call for Chinese
  "The all-English signboards are catering to a false admiration for anything Western. Some people tend to think it's a high-end shop if the name is written in a foreign language," said Huang Anjing, an editor of a local monthly journal, Yaowen Jiaozi.
• 9 Tough Tricks, and a Title for Shanghai
  "This year’s world bridge championships are in Shanghai beginning Sept. 29. And one week ago Shanghai won the Chinese Contract Bridge Association Open Teams championship, beating Qinggong in the 96-board final, 239 international match points to 211."
• Image damage
  "Xuhui District People's Court ... ordered the Shanghai Normal University to compensate 9,000 yuan (US$1,166) to Francesca Manganelli [who] said the institute used her photo without her agreement in an advertisement for student recruitment in June 2005."
• 非常真人's photo-comic blog
  "非常真人，非常娱乐 (Very Real People, Very Entertaining) is a blog that posts short, amusing photo-comics of every day life in Beijing."
• China Yields to Inquiry on Pet Food
  "China .. has given American regulators permission to enter the country to investigate whether Chinese suppliers exported contaminated pet food ingredients to the [US] earlier this year, leading to one of the largest pet food recalls in American history."
• China aims to further tame Web
  "Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday launched a campaign to rid the country's sprawling Internet of 'unhealthy' content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine, state television reported." This happens every week, no?
• China molten steel tragedy highlights lax industry
  "Lax safety measures, unsuitable equipment and 'chaotic' conditions have been blamed for the deaths of 32 steel workers engulfed in molten metal, Chinese investigators announced, warning that such failings were common."
• Letter from Beijing: Enemy of the State
  "Jianguo was arrested and tried in the summer of 1999, and I remember with perfect clarity the moment I learned what had happened."

We just came across a report about foreign inmates in a Shanghai prison taking the HSK test, commonly known as the Chinese TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). Many of Shanghai's foreign prisoners are kept in Qingpu, which has now become the first prison in Shanghai, and probably China, where the foreign inmates are allowed to take Chinese classes and then participate in the test. This time around, the inmates that took the test hailed from countries such as Australia, Korea and Singapore.

Video clip from ttudou.com

There are a few Microsoft fanbois (or is that fanboys?) among Shanghaiist staff. (Emphasis on few.) And not even they (well, notably this contributor) would deny that the glory days of the original MS-DOS came and went long ago, along with our snappy 286 computer and dazzling EGA monitor. But, maybe we're all wrong. What’s old is new again, and DOS is making a comeback, along with bell bottom jeans and throwback jerseys. Walk around Beijing’s Bainaohui/百脑汇 (means “where a hundred brain/computer meets” .. clever, eh?) computer market, and you would find the latest engineering marvels, courtesy of folks at Intel and AMD, running on -- you guessed it -- MS-DOS.

"Ideology by numerology", that seems to be the prevailing wisdom guiding the giant party machine in Beijing. After "One China" and "Three Represents", we now have “Eight dos and don'ts”, courtesy of Chinese President Hu Jintao. It is the centerpiece to his “Socialist concept of honor and disgrace”. Sure, it might not sound like a zinger, but eight is greater than three and way bigger than one. What it lacks in pizzazz, it more than makes up for in quantity. We know you're at the edges of your seats, so without further ado, here is the full list:

">87,000 for 2005, many of those instances involving farmers being coerced off their land with minimum compensation, the government faces the problem of an increasingly restless rural population.

This photo gallery of Chinese coal miners really puts a face on the plight of these laborers. Unsafe work conditions kill them by the hundreds every year. Thirty black and white photos by a Chinese photographer, online monicker k6688, commemorates lives lost in a 2004 coal mine accident in Henan. k6688's photo blog is here (in Chinese).