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
08/17/2012
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.
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
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.
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 TimesAugust 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
08/16/2012
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
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
08/15/2012
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.
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
American voice with Chinese accent
Swaran Singh
How panic and populism underwrite the crude binaries of U.S. assessments on the rise of China and India
Unprecedented growth rates of 10.1 and 6.2 per cent by 2.5 billion strong China and India for last thirty years make their ‘rise’ staple food for academic analyses and media commentaries around the world. Like in most things, the lead again is provided by the sole surviving superpower — the United States — except that mostly panic and populism seem to guide its assessments and initiatives which do not augur well for the long-term.
The book under review underlines three fundamental flaws in U.S. assessments. First, they assume continued growth on current trajectories of both China and India. Second, the bulk of research examines them either as country-studies-in-isolation or as perfectly amalgamated ‘Chindia’ with no cracks sapping their rising power and influence. And finally, most studies remain premised exclusively on ‘regime-type’ binaries rather than on empirical analysis of their actual track record. This is the vacuum that the book seeks to address and it does present a rather thought provoking perspective that is bound to ignite further debates.
Read more at The Hindu
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
Does China's 'superb' tolerance extend to imprisoned and tortured Falun Gong practitioners?
WARNING: GRAPHIC
CONTENT
Flicking through newspapers I missed while on holiday, I’ve come across an article in The Telegraph by Liu Xiaoming, Chinese Ambassador to Britain, under the heading ‘Tibet is a better place than it used to be’ (26/07). In it, he implies that Westerners are basically dummies whose ‘...knowledge of Tibet stops at the fictional Shangri-La and the so-called Han invasion’. He adds that, contrary to what many of us seem to think, China demonstrates ‘a superb example of religious diversity and tolerance’ that would seem to rival Eden itself.
Logically, Mr Xiaoming’s dewy-eyed fondness for the ‘throngs of pilgrims of different ethnic groups’ who pray for blessings at holy sites, and his newly-announced appreciation of Tibetan culture ‘including Buddhism’ must mean that the Communist Party’s ideology that ‘Religion is poison’ no longer holds sway?
It would also seem fair to suppose that this ‘superb’ tolerance extends to all other spiritual groups – i.e. the Christians, Muslim Uighurs and particularly, Falun Gong – a discipline of meditation and slow exercise routines that came into being in the early '90s.
Read more at The Daily Mail.
When you read this, you're on your own as far as veracity is concerned. There is a long history of false stories by the Falung Gong, aimed at improving their image and to undermine the Chinese government.
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
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