REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

Foreigners assist police in south China

NANNING - Michael Axel, a baker from Israel, moonlights as a police assistant in scenic Yangshuo county to help local police solve disputes involving foreigners.

"Yangshuo is a quiet and beautiful county where I live with my Chinese wife. I feel I should do my part in making it a better place for foreign visitors," Axel said.

Axel and another 15 foreigners are members of the Yangshuo Policing International Volunteers Group, which was set up in February 2011 in south China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.  

Yangshuo, located in northeast Guangxi, is known for its breathtaking scenery and diverse cultural appeal, as it is home to 10 different ethnic minorities. The area's numerous ethnic festivals often bring an influx of visitors, many of whom are from other countries.

However, with language barriers and a lack of knowledge regarding Chinese rules and regulations, some foreigners encounter difficulties when visiting the county, some of which result in disputes.

In November 2010, a young man from Australia rode a motorcycle through the streets of Yangshuo without a Chinese driver's license. When traffic police stopped him, both sides ended up in a stalemate for half an hour until the police solicited the help of a British man to help explain local traffic regulations to the Australian.

Incidents like this led county police to form the volunteer group to help them handle incidents involving foreign visitors.

Read More China Daily

China excites public opinion, slanders Vietnam

VietNamNet Bridge – To realize its ambition of controlling the entire East Sea, Chinese newspapers have published articles to excite public opinion, slander countries in the region, especially Vietnam.

China – a hungry dragon in the East Sea

China's greedy U-shaped line in the East Sea.

Dr. Tran Cong Truc, former head of the Government Border Committee, analyzed China’s plot to monopolize the East Sea in his newly-published book entitled “Vietnam’s Imprints in the East Sea.” Below is an extract from the book.

To implement its marine strategy and its ambition to totally control the East Sea, China has applied many domestic and foreign measures, on negotiation table and on the field, to confirm its sovereignty in the East Sea.

China officially raised its U-shaped line claim in May 2009, by attaching a map with this line to a diplomatic note to the United Nations in protesting Vietnam’s report and the joint report of Vietnam and Malaysia on the boundary of the continental shelf. Accordingly, China claimed sovereignty over Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly) Archipelagos and the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and continental shelf of the two archipelagos.

China used the regulations on island nation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS) to outline the baseline for Paracel Islands. It stated to draw the baseline for the Spratly Islands, to claim EEZs and continental shelves for the two archipelagoes.

However, China’s claim is contrary to the UNCLOS; so in general, other countries did not agree with the claim

Read More Vietnam Net

China's Corrupt Food Chain

An April report by China’s national broadcaster CCTV detailed the manufacturing process followed by 16 companies that sell preserved fruit. It made the meat-packing methods described by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle” a century ago seem pale by comparison.

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Qilai Shen/European Pressphoto Agency

Shoppers look at packs of fresh milk at a supermarket in Shanghai in April 2011

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Rotten peaches pickled in outdoor pools surrounded by garbage are spiked with sodium metabisulfite to keep the fruit looking fresh and with bleaching agents and additives harmful to the human liver and kidneys. The peaches are packed in uncleaned bags that previously held animal feed and then shipped off to big-brands stores.

read more The New York Times

China’s slowdown: the impact on Africa

A lot of ink has been spilled of late discussing the global impact of China’s slowing economic growth. But there has been little discussion however about how African economies will be affected.

Now, ratings agency Standard and Poor’s has stepped into the gap with a report published this week. It says, in short,  that the China slow down may be bad for metal exporters, but opportunities should present themselves for African manufacturers.

The export of metals, agricultural commodities and petro-chemicals has been the backbone of most of sub-Saharan Africa’s more successful economies over the past decade, and China has been a key customer.

The IMF estimates that it was responsible for almost all of the world’s consumption increases for copper, lead, nickel, tin and zinc between 1995 and 2011. In 2010, it consumed 40 per cent of the world’s base metals. On the back of Chinese demand – which rebounded spectacularly following the 2008 crash – African commodity exporter nations have enjoyed strong growth even as developed markets have remained in a slump.

Read more FINANCAL TIMES

In China, Anti-Smoking Efforts Hindered by Big Tobacco

Posted Friday, August 17th, 2012 at 5:45 am

A new study says China has the largest number of tobacco users in the world. And analysts say efforts to curb the habit are being hindered by the country's state-owned tobacco enterprises.

The British-based medical journal Lancet said Friday in a report on global smoking rates that around 300 million people, about 28 percent of the population, use tobacco products in China, despite new restrictions on public smoking.

The study's lead author, Dr. Gary Giovino, says China's government-owned cigarette companies, an important source of revenue, are even encouraging the deadly habit with advertisements in elementary schools.

 “The China National Tobacco Company has supported elementary schools in China, dozens and dozens of them. And they use their support to promote propaganda about tobacco use, and they are basically telling students that genius comes from hard work and tobacco helps them to be successful. That to me is mind boggling, that a government would tell its children to use tobacco to be successful when tobacco will addict them and shorten their lives.

Read more VOA

China-Japan Island Dispute Has Long History

The string of islands known as Senkaku islands in Japanese, and Diaoyu in Chinese (2010 file photo)

The chain of uninhabited islands at the center of a territorial dispute between China and Japan sits on top of what are thought to be vast oil deposits, and are surrounded by rich fishing grounds.

But the islands, known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, have a long history of straining relations and inspiring nationalist resentment between the two Asian neighbors, long before the issue of oil resources in the area came up.

China says the islands have been considered part of its territory since the 14th century, when it says they first appeared on Chinese maps during the Ming Dynasty. Beijing says Chinese fishermen have used the islands since ancient times.

​​But Japan disputes that claim, saying it discovered the islands in 1884. After determining the islands were uninhabited, Japan annexed them in 1895 after winning the First Sino-Japanese War. China objects, saying it was forced to sign the post-war treaty that effectively handed the islands over to Japan.

Read more VOA

China’s Most Wanted: How the Cops Got a Murderous Serial Bank Robber

Police carry away the body of Zhou Kehua, the fugitive serial killer and armed robber, from the spot he was shot dead, in Chongqing Municipality, August 14, 2012.

Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/08/15/chinas-most-wanted-how-the-cops-got-a-murderous-serial-bank-robber/#ixzz23mPoGBJX

Before Zhou Kehua became one of China‘s most wanted fugitives, he enjoyed reading and collecting detective novels. When he was short of cash as a teenager, he would sometimes sit on the roadside and rent his novels out, an acquaintance told the Chongqing Morning Post. But as an adult Zhou took a more direct and violent route to raising funds: robbing people at gunpoint, then shooting them and leaving them for dead. Police say he is suspected of killing 10 people in a crime spree that spanned eight years and three major Chinese cities. It came to a bloody end Tuesday when Zhou, 42, was gunned down by two plainclothes officers in Chongqing, his hometown in southwestern China.

 Zhou’s death brought an end to a four-day manhunt that saw thousands of police, military police and troops scouring hillsides in Chongqing’s rural districts. The search was triggered by a shooting outside of a Bank of China branch in the city’s Shapingba district that left a woman dead and two others injured. The assailant, who police identified as Zhou, made off with $11,000, according to state media reports. The authorities feared that he would disappear into the rural districts near where he grew up, but instead he was found early Tuesday on a street in one of Chongqing’s urban districts, possibly preparing for another heist.

Private firearm ownership is illegal in China and gun crimes are rare. The shooting of three civilians in Chongqing on Friday stirred public concern and revived memories of 2009, when a handful of shootings helped spur a massive crackdown on crime. That campaign helped raise the national stature of Chongqing’s then-leader, Bo Xilai, who has since had a spectacular fall from grace. His wife, Gu Kailai, went on trial last week for the poisoning of a British businessman, and Bo, who was removed from office in March, is under investigation by the Communist Party’s internal discipline system.

READ MORE TimeWorld

US Provoking China Militarily, in Both Rhetoric and Policy

The US accused China of militarizing the region, when Washington is the one doing the militarizing

by John Glaser, August 16, 2012

Recent US statements criticizing China for militarizing the South China Sea area have been bitterly rejected by Chinese authorities, who view Washington as doing the militarizing and trying to provoke China.

Source: BBC

Tensions between various Asian countries have been on the rise over territorial disputes and Washington keeps sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong in an attempt to undercut its global competitor, China.

“Judging from the outrage coming from China at being singled out, after Vietnam and the Philippines had taken steps, without being criticized, to secure resources in the contested sea before China’s own actions, the US statement seems to be backfiring,” Douglas H. Paal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Read More Antiwar

China leaders' summer retreat to Beidaihe shrouded in secrecy

Unlike their predecessors Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai, China's present leaders remain behind closed doors during their annual summer retreat to Beidaihe.

A short stretch of the beach at Beidaihe, the enclave to which the Chinese leadership decamps during the summer, is open to the public. The area is also popular with foreign visitors. (Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times / August 14, 2012)

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

August 16, 2012, 6:05 p.m.

BEIDAIHE, China — Celebrity sightings used to be part of the fun in Beidaihe, the summertime retreat of the Chinese Communist Party.

"In the old days, people would see Mao Tse-tung or Zhou Enlai walking around, shopping, eating in a restaurant, talking to ordinary people," said Yu Heping, 62, a lifelong resident who used to farm corn and sorghum and now works in the tourism industry.

Nowadays, the presence of the Chinese leadership is viewed primarily in fleeting shadows through tinted glass, as their black Audis glide past stifling security roadblocks. The leaders remain secluded in their enclave, with their own beaches, their own restaurants and their own gardeners and cleaners who come from Beijing. Locals are rarely hired or admitted into the compound.

"We never see them nowadays — only see their motorcades," said Yu.

It is just another sign of the isolated and secretive nature of the Chinese leadership, ever opaque in its policymaking, even as it has sought to convey a more open and welcoming appearance.

The Chinese hierarchy is well aware that Beidaihe can convey an impression of elitism. In 2003, President Hu Jintao canceled the retreat, in part a public relations ploy to show that the leadership was giving up its perks and in part to minimize the meddling of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who thrived in Beidaihe's smoky, backroom ambience. Later, the tradition resumed; the party elders simply feeling a need to decamp somewhere away from the prying eyes of Beijing.

Read more LosAngeles Times

Chinese Anger Diverted by the Saga of a Hoodlum’s Girlfriend

A pro-China protester tore a Japanese flag at a rally outside the Japanese consulate in Hong Kong on Thursday.

BEIJING — Perhaps topics like the beautiful moll of a multiple-murdering hoodlum just shot dead by police will always fascinate more than politics — even issues that bristle with anger like territorial sovereignty.

Or are China’s netizens so cynical about their own government that they’d rather discuss a criminal’s girlfriend than a clash over land with their historic enemy, Japan?

Genuine anger built online in China on Thursday over the detention the previous day of 14 Chinese activists by the Japanese coast guard on the Diaoyu islands, which China claims but Japan controls. China demanded that Japan immediately release the activists, something that may happen soon, as my colleague Martin Fackler reports.

Hitoshi Maeshiro/European Pressphoto AgencyA Chinese activist in shackles was in Japanese custody on Okinawa.

Inflaming tempers, two Japanese government ministers — the National Public Safety Commission chairman, Jin Matsubara, and the land minister, Yuichiro Hata — visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on Wednesday to mark the anniversary of Japan’s capitulation in World War II. The shrine honors Japan’s war dead, including 14 declared war criminals. Many Chinese harbor deep resentment of what they perceive as Japan’s refusal to acknowledge its war crimes in China.

Read more The New York Times

China Poodle ‘Babies’ Spur $1.2 Billion Pet-Care Market

Wang Xingru and her husband chose a fluffy brown alternative to parenthood named Jing Jing. Before welcoming the year-old toy poodle into their Beijing apartment last summer, the couple spent 5,000 yuan ($786) in veterinary fees, including shots and medication.

This month they paid 288 yuan for a fur-trim, perm and pedicure for the 8-inch-long (20-centimeter) pooch. The treatments add to a pet-care market in China that Euromonitor International Ltd. estimates will reach $1.2 billion this year, helped by a 35 percent jump in pet ownership since 2000.

“We don’t want kids because we feel it’s too expensive and tiring,” said Wang, 39, a legal officer for a state-owned company. “And I don’t want to become a full-time housewife.”

As rising disposable incomes and pet popularity bolster revenue for veterinary services and treatments in China, companies from Paris-based Sanofi (SAN) to Westbrook, Maine-based Idexx Laboratories Inc. (IDXX) are moving in, giving them a buffer from slower demand growth in their home markets.

In a ground-floor treatment room of the Guanshang Animal Hospital in Beijing, a 400,000-yuan ultrasound scanner made by Shenzhen-based Mindray Medical International Ltd. (MR) stands beside a glass table large enough to accommodate a Labrador. One floor above, laboratory technicians run blood tests on devices made by Idexx and Sysmex Corp. (6869) of Japan.

Read more BLOOMBERG

Inside China, Getting Rich Isn't Always So Glorious

Decades ago, China's Deng Xiaoping is said to have energized the nation's capitalists by declaring: "To get rich is glorious."

Turns out that really meant: "Get rich and you'll get audited."

   A warning to foreign companies that link up with >enterprises run by the celebrated rich in China: In the Middle Kingdom, the >business elite that's highly public can get increased, and often deadly,. John Bussey has details on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters.

Entrepreneurs who make it big and land on well-publicized rich lists in China are more likely to draw government scrutiny, some new research shows. That can be costly—to the business and the entrepreneur. And while plenty of highfliers in the business elite still easily avoid this sort of problem, the finding
highlights the troubling forces at work in China's complex, and evolving,
business culture.

More at  WSJ

 

Why Japan, South Korea, and China Are So Riled Up Over a Few Tiny Islands

The old nationalist tensions are rising over some disputed Asian islands. >
Japanese nationalists protest the South Korean president's visit to a disputed island. (Reuters)

August 15 marks the anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia.  Japan's defeat was complete, and its losses unprecedented. Today,  Japanese television coverage traced the final days of devastation, with  those who lived through the war (now in their 80s) narrating accounts of the firebombing that ruined most of Tokyo and the atomic bombing that  obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Japanese it continues to be a  day of national mourning for those lost, and an annual opportunity to  remind the nation and its neighbors of Japan's postwar commitment to  peace.

For Japan's neighbors, however, it seems that August 15 is  increasingly an opportunity to demonstrate their own national narratives of the war. This year South Korean president Lee Myung-bak became the  first president to visit the contested Takeshima/Tokdo Islands, and his  speech celebrating Korea's liberation from Japanese occupation reminded  Japan that Koreans will not forgive their neighbor for its wartime  enslavement of Korean women.

Read more  THE ATLANTIC

China Moves Cautiously In Face Of Worsening Slump

BEIJING August 15, 2012, 05:17 am ET

BEIJING (AP) — Summer should be the busy season for Shen Lin's musical instrument workshop in the southwestern city of Kunming. But her monthly sales of traditional wooden flutes are dwindling as China's economy slows, with no sign of a widely anticipated rebound in sight.

"I have less for my workers to do, which means they are paid less. They complain, but I have no choice," said Shen, who runs the company with her husband. "I don't know when things will improve."

China's economic recovery is taking longer than expected. But facing a collapse in export growth and weak consumer spending, Beijing is avoiding an aggressive stimulus and sticking to a gradual strategy of small interest rate cuts and modest spending increases.

A repeat of China's huge stimulus in response to the 2008 crisis, based on a government-led flood of investment, could push up overall growth. But it would set back efforts to nurture a self-sustaining expansion based on domestic consumption, reducing reliance on exports and investment in a shift economists say is needed to keep incomes and living standards rising.

The 2008 stimulus helped China emerge quickly from the global crisis but fueled inflation and a building frenzy that left some communities with underused highways, stadiums and other facilities and debt they might not be able to repay.

"The government isn't sitting on its hands. It has been acting," said Capital Economics analyst Mark Williams. "People remember what happened in 2008, and obviously compared to that, it seems like a pretty lackluster reaction. But a re-run of that would do more harm than good."

Read more at NPR

Double Take 'Toons: China Sputtering

China's trade growth plunged in July, raising more concerns about the global economic recovery. Peter Nicholson says some countries are too dependent on Beijing, while John Cole feels we shouldn't just be focusing on China's growth rate.

politicalcartoons.com

Gangs no deterrent to Chinese gamblers

Galaxy Macau, which opened last year,  is one of Macau's biggest, most glittering attractions. Source: AP

Tedious, certainly, and a needlessly cruel time tax to impose on people about to drop stacks of money on the turn of a card, but not wildly unusual. Weekends normally strain Macau's hopelessly underpowered, bureaucratic infrastructure as thousands of Chinese jostle their way to the baccarat tables.

But the length of the queues in China's only legal gambling enclave is worth noting for two reasons. The first is that the lines of visitors were snaking around the arrivals hall in cheerful defiance of recent news. This month, police in the former Portuguese colony swooped on several casinos and hotels and rounded up more than 150 people. The raids followed three murders over the previous fortnight and come amid fears that the bad old days of gang warfare may return to Macau, particularly when the triad kingpin Wan "Broken Tooth" Kuok-koi is released from prison later in the year.

Read more at The Australian

Phys Ed, China’s Losing Game

By CLARISSA SEBAG-MONTEFIORE

A young gymnast practiced on the balance beam at a juvenile gymnastics training base in Wuhan, Hubei province.

BEIJING — China may be racking up medals at the Olympics in London and it may have celebrated National Fitness Day on Aug. 8, yet it’s anything but a nation of athletes.

Even though the 2008 Beijing Olympics, with their muscular opening ceremony and new records, put China at the center of the sporting map, they have failed to popularize sports among the Chinese. Some say they’ve even had the opposite effect.

“The culture created around the Olympics is that sports is something for the elite: if you can’t win medals, you have no interest,” Paul French, a co-author of “Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation,” told me. “People live an even more sedentary lifestyle.”

The legacy of the Beijing Olympics has been to promote grand performances rather than grassroots change. Special programs pluck promising athletes from mainstream education, channeling them into a vast state sports system inspired by the Soviet Union. Other children are excluded because they are considered to be the wrong height or weight.

Read more at International Herald Tribune

How bacteria could solve China's rush-hour blues

Software that imitates the collective behaviour of bacteria could help create intelligent traffic lights that manage teeming masses of city traffic.

As the largest city in southern China, with a population of around 13 million, Guangzhou has traffic so bad it's legendary. One way to alleviate it would be to increase the intelligence of traffic lights – converting them from dumb beasts that beat out the same rhythm all day long into dynamic managers of vehicle flow.

And now two Chinese researchers have proved, at least theoretically, that insights borrowed from the lowly bacterium E. coli could markedly increase the throughput of a real-world traffic light in Guangzhou. No one knows what effect this could have if it were applied to an entire city, but it's fitting that a solution from a class of algorithms that seek to mimic the collective behaviour of organisms should be applied to the teeming masses of Guangzhou's trucks and automobiles.

Traffic lights around the world, from Guangzhou to Geneva, are managed by computerised systems housed in a metal cabinet at the side of the road, which regulate the cycle of changes from red to green to red either through fixed time periods, or through sensors in the road that can detect when a car is stationary. Both options work well when traffic is low, less so during rush hour, as any driver will tell you.

The solution Qin Liu and Jianmin Xu have proposed for improving flow during high traffic periods is what's known as a Bacterial Foraging Optimisation (BFO) algorithm. The algorithm varies when and for how long a given light is red or green. So, for example, the algorithm has an almost traffic cop-like sense for which road at an intersection has a higher volume of traffic, and when to strategically deprioritise traffic that may be waiting on a less-used road. Simulations of a Guangzhou intersection showed that BFO-regulated lights reduce the average delay of vehicles by over 28% compared with those regulated by a fixed time cycle.

Read more at The BBC

'Twitter Is My City': An Exclusive Interview with Ai Weiwei

Beijing's best-known dissident, architect, and creative provocateur tells Jonathan Landreth what's wrong with China's frenetic capital

INTERVIEW BY JONATHAN LANDRETH |SEPT/OCT 2012

Ai Weiwei's studio compound sits behind high, ivy-covered gray brick walls on an isolated street in Beijing's shabby northeast outskirts. China's best-known dissident, architect, and creative provocateur, Ai used to travel around the country making art and recording injustice: He helped design Beijing's famous Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics (before denouncing it as "propaganda") and fought with authorities in Sichuan province over their handling of the 2008 earthquake, in which thousands of children died. All that stopped, however, when Chinese police imprisoned him in April 2011 on politically motivated charges of tax evasion; when he was finally released after 81 days in custody, he was forbidden from leaving Beijing for a year. (He has since been given permission to travel domestically.) Ai, who lived in New York for much of the 1980s, has become a patron of China's disaffected urbanites, and here, in his tranquil garden, he holds court, offering advice to the thousands of fans, bloggers, activists, and petitioners who visit from all across China and the world. Despite the government's relentless attempts to shut him up, Ai is still talking. The first change he would make to Chinese cities? Free the people.

Read more at Foreign Policy

Living with Dead Hearts Official Trailer

Heading for the Exits in China

David Gray/ReutersAir pollution is a commonly heard complaint in China’s mega-cities. A Beijing street cleaner took precautions in June.

HONG KONG — Charlie Custer, a filmmaker and blogger, is back in the United States. Left China. Couldn’t take it any more. Bad air. Unsafe food. And there was a nasty-scary spat with a government journalist.

Mark Kitto, a Welshman and a resident of China for 16 years, he’s going, too. “I won’t be rushing back either,” he says. “I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream.”

The artist Ai Weiwei cannot leave. The authorities won’t let him. After his studio was demolished in Shanghai, he relocated to Beijing, which he calls “a city of violence.”

“You will see migrants’ schools closed,” he said of Beijing in a Newsweek essay last year. “You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches — and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.

“This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.”

And China’s nightmare-cities are expanding. There are now more than 40 Chinese cities with populations over a million. In a dozen years, there will be more than 220 such cities, according to McKinsey projections cited in a new Foreign Policy series on China’s urban woes.

Read more at The New York Times

 

Serial killer shot dead this early morning

A fugitive gunman who is suspected of killing nine
and wounding several others in armed robberies since 2004 was shot dead in
southwest China's Chongqing Municipality Tuesday. (Photo/Sina Weibo)

CHONGQING, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- A fugitive gunman who is suspected of killing
nine and wounding several others in armed robberies since 2004 was shot dead in
southwest China's Chongqing Municipality Tuesday, local police said.

Zhou was killed at the scene by police at Wosungou in Tongjiaqiao Village, in
Qinjiagang Township of Chongqing's Shapingba District at 6:50 a.m., according to
police officers with the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau.

Police said that Zhou's DNA information provided by police in Jiangsu
Province and his physical characteristics provided by police in Changsha City of
Hunan Province laid a "solid foundation" for the operation.

Read more at Sina English

Chinese historian battling prejudice to honor Japanese settlers who perished in war

Guo Xiangsheng is seeking to have the bank of the
Daluomi River in Fangzheng county, where many Japanese settlers were washed
away, designated a historical site. (Koichiro Ishida)

By KOICHIRO ISHIDA/ Correspondent

FANGZHENG COUNTY, China--Amid all the rancor in China over Japan's war
responsibility, local historian Guo Xiangsheng comes across as a lone voice in
the wilderness.

He is campaigning to preserve the memory of thousands of Japanese settlers
who died in China after the Imperial Japanese Army abandoned them in the chaotic
close of World War II.

The seeds of his quest lie in Japan's military occupation of northeastern
China. Many Japanese were sent there as farmers to raise productivity after
Tokyo established its Manchukuo puppet state in 1932.

Later, the settlers were dragooned to defend its northern borders against the
Soviet Red Army, which overran the region in August 1945.

The settlers were left to fend for themselves after the Japanese army
fled.

It is estimated that 5,000 Japanese settlers perished in Fangzheng county
alone in the immediate aftermath of Japan's surrender

From the Chinese perspective, the Japanese settlers were "invaders," says the
62-year-old Guo. On the other hand, they were left behind by the army that was
supposed to protect them.

For this reason, Guo wants Chinese to view the Japanese settlers in
Heilongjiang province, which includes Fangzheng county, as victims of the war
rather than as aggressors.

Read more at Asahi Simbun

Medals obscure cost of China's state-run sports regime

Weeds cover a deserted theme park north of Beijing

By Ian Ransom and Ryan McNeill

LONDON | Tue Aug 14, 2012
2:09am IST

LONDON (Reuters) - China's massive medal
haul at the London Games has once again showcased the country's ability to
produce champions through its rigid Soviet-style sports regime, but national
pride has been tempered by concerns about the human costs of sporting
glory.

Chinese bloggers expressed their disgust last week after a Shanghai newspaper
reported that the parents of Olympic diver Wu Minxia had concealed her mother's
long battle with breast cancer for fear of disturbing her training.

Wu, 26, who was also shielded from news of her grandparents' deaths, shrugged
off the controversy to win both the sychronised and individual three-metre
springboard events in London.

"It's not only Chinese athletes who are like this. Parents seldom come to our
training base and we are just like a big family who all train together," Wu said
after winning the individual title on Sunday.

"There may be distance from our families but the distance doesn't make us
feel we are far apart. I chose to be a diver to pursue this goal."

Read more at REUTERS

China’s Gao Shan heads home to face charges on $130M fraud ring after eight years hiding in Vancouver

Eight years after he slipped out of China to take up a quiet suburban life in Vancouver, Gao Shan, the accused mastermind of a $130-million embezzlement ring, has returned home to face fraud charges.

The sudden surrender ends Mr. Gao’s careful eight-year bid to evade the international reach of Chinese authorities.

Reportedly, the ex-banker “came to the conclusion that if he ultimately going to be sent back anyway it might be better if he was sent back voluntarily,” said Clive Ansley, a B.C. litigation lawyer who practiced in Shanghai for 13 years.

Mr. Gao is the former manager of the Bank of China branch in Harbin, a city of 10 million near the Russian border. According to Chinese authorities, between 2000 and 2004 Mr. Gao was the ringleader of a scheme to siphon cash from corporate accounts.

‘I don’t think the Chinese government likes to talk openly about it — it’s kind of embarrassing that they couldn’t find these potential criminals before they left the country’

Only weeks before the alleged fraud was discovered, say Chinese officials, Mr. Gao boarded a plane to Canada. Just before leaving, the banker reportedly told colleagues he was merely going to Beijing for surgery. He also instructed a colleague to hold onto his cell phone and leave it on. “Mr. Gao appears to have been trying to create the illusion that he was still in China,” reads the transcript of a 2007 Canadian immigration hearing.

Read more at National Post