Teddy Bloggie Blog Blogging

Characters for harmony and equilibrium which together stand for peace. "When there is equilibrium among humans, then nature and the heavens are balanced, and peace prevails."

Today, I was thinking about how this weblog probably wouldn't exist if I were living in China. There, I would be afraid to question the views of the state. You can do it if you want to (so long as you don't discuss Taiwan independence or the Falun Gong), but people generally don't because they remember what happened in the 60's during the cultural revolution, when anyone with rightist views were persecuted, sometimes jailed, sometimes killed. McCarthyism times 100. My father's uncle who lived with us during my childhood was labeled a rightist for spouting ideas different from Maoist socialist ideology and was jailed for many years. He never really recovered from that experience, always loafing around the streets after his release, unable to hold a job and burdened by his reluctant silence. No, I'm glad I'm writing this weblog in this country because I know my right to speak my mind is the very essence of our democratic government and only by exercising free speech can it be sustained. It doesn't matter if I agree with Bush or if I hold the popular opinion because dissent is expected, not frowned upon.

Sometimes I wish I focused more of my attention on happier events, stuff that doesn't tempt me to be critical or cynical; alas, I seem drawn to publicizing the threats around me. Well, today I want to point out the threat to academic freedom. This one is from the Hoover Institue of Stanford. Sometimes, even the farm across the way comes up with a great critque of popular rhetoric.

The Crisis Role of the University by John H. Bunzel

Why, one wonders, are various conservatives and other voices of the political right seemingly driven to drawing up enemy lines?

I just sent off my taxes today, only to read about the U.S. using my money to spy on China; and then getting caught for it. There's a single angle story in the Times today. I say single because it only concerns who was responsible for this embarassment, and it's really only suitable as a gossip column instead of a proper news article that tries to figure the incident's impact on international relations. I'd be really concerned about how China's reacting to this, especially since they have a part to play in our up-and-coming dealings with North Korea. It leaves almost all my questions of this event unanswered, including why we felt planting bugs on China's version of Air Force One was necessary and who makes the decisions that go into these operations.

This whole incident is typical of U.S.'s hypocrisy. Our government goes around and plants bugs while at the same time it gets wildly upset when it, without sufficient evidence, detains a Chinese-American nuclear scientist who is suspected of stealing information. Time to get off your high horse.

I mean, since Bush has been in office, we've been caught spying on our friends in the U.N. and NATO on top of being caught spying on China. It's hard to openly deal with friends and allies when you're known to perform colonoscopies on other governments with the NSA, FBI and CIA. I wonder why the paper spends so much time trying to figure out where the leaks are instead of trying to figure out how terribly costly this whole operation has been. The international political fallout and disgust with the way the U.S. conducts foreign policy should be the news. The actions of this administration remind me of Nixon's domestic political games, except in this case it's our foreign policy and international reputation that are getting trashed by Bush and pal's insecurities. It's pathetic.

Spy Suspect May Have Told Chinese of Bugs, U.S. Says By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, April 14 — Counterintelligence officials fear that an F.B.I. informer in Los Angeles tipped off the Chinese government to a covert United States effort to plant listening devices aboard China's version of Air Force One, several government officials said today.

There's a new way to travel around Shanghai, and it won Popular Science's Best of What's New in the category of Engineering.

Popular Science | Shanghai Transrapid

While other countries argued over the feasibility of maglev trains, the Chinese went and built one. The Shanghai Transrapid is the world's most advanced ground-transportation system: Floating half an inch off its guideway, it whisks passengers along at 267 miles per hour on an ultrasmooth and remarkably quiet ride. Its $1.2 billion track runs from downtown Shanghai to the Pudong International Airport, and the 19-mile trip takes all of 8 minutes. The secret to its speediness? Electromagnetic levitation (or maglev) technology. Electromagnetic force is used to make the train hover, and to provide vertical and horizontal stabilization. The frequency, intensity and direction of the electrical current in the track control the train's movement, while the power for the levitation system is supplied by the train's onboard batteries, which recharge whenever the train is moving. By putting the propulsion system in the guideway rather than onboard, the cars can be lighter, which enables the floating train to accelerate to nearly 200 mph in about 2 minutes.

I'm in China right now and there are a few websites that I can't reach. I'm not sure if they are being censored or it's the service in the particular internet pub I'm in. Here's the list:

babelfish
amazon
ucdavis webmail
caches of google searches

But I can reach:
nytimes
cnn

Hmm...

When you arrive at the Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, skip the taxis... take the maglev train. Closest feeling I've ever had to warp speed.

Date: 3/31/2004

I've been thinking about how economically unbalanced the world is with the US spending much more than it earns and with China and other countries supplying the credit that the U.S. takes for granted. It's producing a lot of unsustainable and dangerous results like the housing bubble in California, New York, D.C., and overinvestment in export industries in China, for example. In addition, this imbalance will eventually show up in the political sphere. This article is a good backgrounder on the situation in China.

Does the Future Belong to China?
A new power is emerging in the East. How America should handle unprecedented new challenges, threats—and opportunities.
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

May 9 issue - Americans admire beauty, but they are truly dazzled by bigness. Think of the Grand Canyon, the California redwoods, Grand Central Terminal, Disney World, SUVs, the American armed forces, General Electric, the Double Quarter Pounder (With Cheese) and the Venti Latte. Europeans prefer complexity and nuance, the Japanese revere minuteness and minimalism. But Americans like size, preferably supersize.

That's why China hits the American imagination so hard. It is a country whose scale dwarfs the United States—1.3 billion people, four times America's population. For more than a hundred years it was dreams of this magnitude that fascinated small groups of American missionaries and businessmen—1 billion souls to save; 2 billion armpits to deodorize—but it never amounted to anything. China was very big, but very poor. All that is changing. But now the very size and scale that seemed so alluring is beginning to look ominous. And Americans are wondering whether the "China threat" is nightmarishly real.

Every businessman these days has a dazzling statistic about China, meant to stun the listener into silence. And they are an impressive set of numbers. China is now the world's largest producer of coal, steel and cement, the second largest consumer of energy and the third largest importer of oil, which is why gas prices are soaring. China's exports to the United States have grown by 1,600 percent over the past 15 years, and U.S. exports to China have grown by 415 percent.

The most astonishing example of growth is surely Shanghai. Fifteen years ago, Pudong, in east Shanghai, was undeveloped countryside. Today it is Shanghai's financial district, eight times the size of London's new financial district, Canary Wharf, in fact only slightly smaller than the city of Chicago. And speaking of Venti Lattes, last week Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz noted on CNBC that in three years the company would probably have more cafes in China than in the United States.

Today, the Treasury Department issued a report stating that China's currency peg is close to what it would classify as manipulation of foreign exchange. The currency peg has been around since 1994, but the growing trade deficit and political pressures in the U.S., especially from the manufacturing (export-competing) industries, is bringing the issue to a head. There are two trends that created this problem. First, China is growing and exporting more as they become more efficient at manufacturing. Second, the U.S. is spending much more than it earns. When you spend more than you earn, your currency tends to devalue. China is pegged to the dollar so it also devalues. And since Chinese goods get cheaper as a result, especially to non-pegged currencies such as Euros, its exports increase.

It's important to see that the U.S. is partly to blame by becoming the biggest debtor nation in the world, but there's not a mention of this anywhere in the Treasury Department report nor in the general U.S. media. Yes, China should move off of the peg, but the U.S. has to balance its budgets and increase national savings. Those Bush tax cuts and ballooning war costs are partly responsible. Hearing the U.S. Treasury Department simply talk about the Renminbi Peg is like watching two drunk drivers crash into each other and one yelling to the other, "Hey, you're drunk!"

On a side note, if China adjusts its peg expect to see a lower demand for American Treasury Bills and thus a rise in the interest rate here in the U.S. When your line of credit gets cancelled, you have to spend what you earn, and invest less in non-productive assets like housing and cars. This happens at a macro level too. It will probably mean the end of the housing bubble in the U.S. and a slow shift of investment into productive assets like industrial equipment and education that will allow the U.S. to produce tradable goods in the future in order to pay off some of its debts. If it doesn't, it will mean a large negative real adjustment in U.S. consumption -- recession.

So, is the Bush Administration for bashing China or against it? Brad Setzer

Today, depending on how you want to look at it, the Bush Administration either upped the heat on China by signaling that it will declare China a manipulator the next time, or wimped out. Setting the clock ticking might buy the Administration the ability to push the Congressional vote on Schumer-Graham off until after October. But splitting the difference also risks pleasing no one.

On one hand, it is pretty clear that China's commitment to its current peg is "preventing effective balance of payments adjustment" -- the key technical criteria for currency manipulation.

On the other hand, it is not entirely obvious the US really wants "effective balance of payments adjustment." Debtor countries usually quite like getting the financing needed to keep running up their debts. Apart from the manufacturing sector, most of the US seems to quite like not paying enough taxes to finance the current level of government spending, cheap imports that keep down inflation and low interest rates that push up housing prices. Real adjustment means shifting resources out of real estate and into the production of tradable goods and services. Right now, not adjusting seems a lot more fun.

china hungry for oil

马季 is a genius. Listening to the Chinese stand-up comedy is a joy because sometimes only comedy can reflect life so well. Chinese comedy is a reflection of Chinese culture and a snapshot of Chinese life. Listening to it, even if details slip past me, reminds me of when 上海话和国语 were the only spoken languages I knew. I'm grateful to 王艳 for giving me the 马季 anthology, all 20 cd's worth.

多层饭店 - a critique of early reform China where planned economy suffered from an overwrought bureauracy and over employment.　

http://the88s.blogsome.com/

for example:
in lawed
dinner with a chinese neocon
9 men who run China

Another good political blog about China:
http://chinesepolitics.blogspot.com/

September 4, 2006 NY Times Rules Ignored, Toxic Sludge Sinks Chinese Village By JIM YARDLEY

URAD QIANQI, China Dark as soy sauce, perfumed with a chemical stench, the liquid waste from two paper mills overwhelmed the tiny village of Sugai. Villagers tried to construct a makeshift dike, but the toxic water swept it away. Fifty-seven homes sank into a black, polluted lake.

The April 10 industrial spill, described by five residents of the village in Inner Mongolia, was a small-scale environmental disaster in a country with too many of them. But Sugai should have been different. The two mills had already been sued in a major case, fined and ordered to upgrade their pollution equipment after a serious spill into the Yellow River in 2004.

The official response to that spill, praised by the state-run news media, seemed to showcase a new, tougher approach toward pollution until the later spill at Sugai revealed that local officials had never carried out the cleanup orders. Now, the destruction of Sugai is a lesson in the difficulty of enforcing environmental rules in China.

The smell made me want to vomit, one villager said recently, as he showed the waist-high watermark on the remains of his home. There is no shortage of environmental laws and regulations in China, many of them passed in recent years by a central government trying to address one of the worst pollution problems in the world. But those problems persist, in part, because environmental protection is often subverted by local protectionism, corruption and regulatory inefficiency.

Even as many domestic and international environmental groups now credit China with beginning to take the environment seriously, pollution is actually worsening in some crucial categories. Emissions of sulfur dioxide, the building block of acid rain, rose by 27 percent between 2000 and 2005; government projections had called for a 20 percent reduction.

It is clear the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection is coming to a head, said Zhou Shengxian, director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, or SEPA, according to the official New China News Agency.

The broader tension of balancing environmental protection with fast economic growth is not likely to ease. China wants to double the size of its economy by 2020. And yet Mr. Zhou did not hesitate to assign much of the blame for the undercutting of pollution control efforts to corruption and fraud by local officials.

Despite its rising public profile, the State Environmental Protection Administration remains one of the weakest agencies in the central government bureaucracy and has sought to increase its regulatory powers. For years, it has complained that local environmental protection bureaus are accountable to local officials rather than the state agency. This has meant that local regulators had to answer to mayors or other local officials who may have had financial or other interests in protecting polluting industries.

In early August, SEPA announced that it would establish 11 regional offices to monitor pollution problems better. The agency also announced that local officials eligible for promotion would be judged on their pollution track record, in addition to how well they deliver economic growth.

Public disgust over pollution is growing. In May, the official English-language newspaper China Daily reported that more than 50,000 disputes and protests arose in 2005 over pollution. Public complaints to the national environmental administration rose by 30 percent.

We have heard many complaints saying. no clean official, no clean water, Zhang Lijun, a deputy director at SEPA, told China Daily.

Here in Urad Qianqi, a city along the Yellow River that encompasses Sugai, officials delayed for almost five weeks before finally refusing to be interviewed about the spill. Provincial officials also declined to talk, as did administrators with the paper mills and the local irrigation district.

In July, a reporter, photographer and researcher for The New York Times visited the village after being warned it was under official watch to prevent outsiders from entering. After nightfall, a sedan without license plates pursued the Timess hired car and tried to force it to the side of the road. The Times's car escaped to a highway but was later stopped by the police, who questioned the driver for about three hours.

Even without official cooperation, the basic chronology of the Sugai spill can be reconstructed through interviews with villagers, the handful of accounts in the Chinese news media and reports issued by the environmental agency.

For decades, the two factories, Saiwai Xinghuazhang Paper Company and Meili Beichen Paper Company, dumped their toxic sludge directly into the Yellow River. Five years ago, the introduction of new regulations ended that dumping, and factories began pumping the waste instead into a long drainage canal connected to the region's intricate irrigation and flood protection system.

But in June 2004, the commission that regulates the irrigation system decided to address rising water levels in the system by dumping polluted canal water into the Yellow River. The release created a pollution slick that killed tens of thousands of fish and plunged the downstream city of Baotou into a drinking water crisis that lasted several days.

Industrial accidents are common in China. Millions of residents in Harbin, in northeastern China, were forced to depend on bottled water after a major benzene spill contaminated the Songhua River last November. During the first four months of 2006, SEPA reported another 49 major industrial accidents and illegal pollution discharges. A study it released last month found that roughly 80 percent of China's 7,555 more heavily polluting factories are located on rivers, lakes or in heavily populated areas.

I'm staying at a hotel called "Orange Hotel" in Beijing. Sign next to the ethernet plug in my room reads, "Reminder from Orange Man. Please don't view any website includes information of gambling or eroticism. Please don't spread any information against the society."

How long will these signs be seen in China? How long will awkward grammar be seen? 10years? 5 years?

I'd guess 7.5 years, after which they will seem quaint.

Look at that! Doesn't it look like RMB and dollar held hands, ran as fast as they could, and then lept of a cliff? It makes me think about gravity models of trade...

Inflation in the U.S. has been kept at bay in part because of low tradable prices due to China holding the RMB-Dollar exchange rate constant (increasing the demand for dollars by buying up US treasuries and selling RMB), but it has been creeping up ever since China loosened its unofficial peg to the dollar. It's got a ways to go before RMB-dollar hits about 4-1 based on my own gut feelings of purchasing price parity. But if it keeps going -- the way it has for the last three years -- that'll come very soon. If I were a real estate broker in Malibu or NYC, I'd be learning Chinese or Russian.*

The devaluation of the Dollar also means we're going to be importing inflation (among other causes such as our loose monetary policy to save our banks and increases in commodity prices) and that's why I tell myself that I need my dollars in real assets like old motorcycles.

Also, I feel pretty good about what I said back in May, 2005.

* Because the Europeans are more better well-spoken than we is.