ETHNIC-Chinese shopkeepers in Lhasa's old Tibetan quarter knew better than the security forces that the city had become a tinder-box. As word spread rapidly through the narrow alleyways on March 14th that a crowd was throwing stones at Chinese businesses, they shuttered up their shops and fled. The authorities, caught by surprise, held back as the city was engulfed by its biggest anti-Chinese protests in decades.
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Nearly overnight, the focus of the 17th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress has shifted from the debate regarding Chinese political and economic reform to the promotion of internal party unity and the combating of Taiwan’s proposed referendum. This change has come about due to increasing concerns raised by the party rank-and-file, intellectuals and ordinary citizens over dislocations in the economy, particularly regarding the runaway prices of commodities and services ranging from foodstuffs…
Hu’s Economic Policies: Liberalizing the Economy or Promoting Special Interests?
09.08. 2007 PoliticsWhile widely recognized as holding conservative ideological and political views, the Hu Jintao leadership has been given reasonably high marks for pushing forward economic reforms first initiated by the late patriarch Deng Xiaoping. According to World Trade Organization provisions, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has opened up an unprecedented number of sectors for foreign equity participation. Yet, the authorities have at the same time tightened control over other aspects of the economy.…
“Green GDP” has been the new catchphrase in the Chinese media and politicaldiscourse in the past few years. China’s State Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) jointly released China’s first Green GDP report in 2006, which measures the country’s GDP performance against the cost of resources and the impact on the environment. It concludes that a limited calculation of pollution alone cost 3.05 percent of China’s GDP in 2004 [1]. The widely reported new…
Until recently, Chinese military training was widely dismissed as infrequent, unrealistic and overly scripted. In the 1980s and 1990s, outside observers and internal critics alike raised doubts about the utility of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) exercises, and it was clear that training deficiencies represented one of the most serious challenges. For example, Western analysts noted that PLA Air Force (PLAAF) pilots flew an insufficient number of hours on a yearly basis and that the…
A Chinese couple beat their daughter to death a few days before her third birthday because she could not recognise one Chinese character, a newspaper said on Friday. The father, identified only by the surname Zeng, and his wife, Zhang, were arrested in the central province of Henan on Wednesday after the attack on the girl who could not read the Chinese character 'jiao', meaning 'banana', the Beijing News said. The child 'with bruises all around the body' died in the hospital after…