Year of the Rabbit

My Chinese Panda Rabbit meditating.

China’s New Weapon of Mass Destruction, More Dangerous Than a “Dirty Bomb”

from the chinadaily BEIJING – The Chinese company CSR.. ” is interested in bidding to supply high-speed trains to the US,” the source said. …China’s two major train manufacturers hope to get on track for potential business opportunities following the $53 billion high-speed rail investment plan unveiled by the Obama administration on Tuesday.”

Beijing Has Snow Just in Time…

Today Beijing is covered with a marvelous coating of light snow which has quickly assumed a dingy gray pallor. The benefit is that the snow has fallen before Christma… no too late for that, for New Year… no too late as well. I guess we can count ourselves fortunate that the snow has fallen before the Lantern Day Festival

China’s Splintered Legal System

here is an excerpt on Chinese Law and how it functions. I believe I got this from SSRN.com , but if not you can google it and find the paper, it is from Donald C Clarke, one of the experts in the field. excerpt from : : HOW DO WE KNOW WHEN AN ENTERPRISE EXISTS? UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS AND LEGAL POLYCENTRICITY IN CHINA Donald C. Clarke* “One of the most perplexing aspects of Chinese enterprise law concerns the conditions under which state institutions will acknowledge and give effect to the existence of a business organization distinct from the natural or legal persons that participate in its operations. The answer might appear to be simple –they will do so whenever legally stipulated conditions are met –but this answer would be wrong. State institutions often give real and meaningful effect to the existence of entities with no apparent statutory basis, or whose legal basis dictates consequences that seem at odds with the consequences called for by constitutionally superior law. On what basis does the court (or some other government agency) decide that a corporation does or does not exist?a corporation does or does not exist? It is this question in the Chinese enterprise law context that I want to raise in this essay. Chinese courts and government agencies do not consider a statute to be necessary for the recognition of an organization’s existence. At the same time, however, a mere assertion by an interested party is not good enough, either. But if a legal basis is not required, what exactly is the basis of a governmental decision that an entity exists or not? This essay postulates that the very attempt to find a consistent rule involves a misunderstanding of what the system is all about; that the system under examination is not designed to produce consistent rules, and that any rationalization of existing decisions is not the discovery of an inherent underlying principle, but rather nothing more than a formulation that happens to fit the materials today but may not fit them tomorrow. There simply does not exist any consistent rule of recognition guiding the decisions of various governmental agencies in China when they face the question of whether or not to acknowledge a claim that a particular business entity “exists” and that particular consequences should follow from the existence. While such a consistent rule might be a good idea, there is nothing in the Chinese legal system that will operate to produce one.the Chinese legal system that will operate to produce one. This claim follows from what I posit as a fundamental characteristic of China’s current legal system: its radical polycentricity. This claim might be the equivalent of saying that there is no single Chinese legal “system”; that there are instead many Chinese legal systems, each with its own jurisdiction, hierarchy of authority, and way of operating. As a result, Chinese enterprise law is only a part of what there is to say about Chinese enterprise organization and the practical rights of various claimants to enterprise assets: investors, creditors, managers, workers, customers, tort victims, and others. Indeed, a legal sanction is not necessary for a Chinese enterprise to have a valid legal existence, by which I mean an existence that is acknowledged as affecting legal rights of various parties. An enterprise can “exist” if a government agency says it exists and has the capacity to make its fiat respected in part or all of the system. There are no rules about which government agency has the power to create what kind of enterprise, and there is no settled way to resolve disputes about such power. -” by Donald C. Clarke

China’s Water Shortage and the Three Gorges Dam

China really needs to manage her resources, they are starving for water. excerpt from the China daily: ” Zhao Yunfa, deputy chief engineer of the Three Gorges hydro-power control communication center, said the reservoir’s water discharge would continue, and its water level was scheduled to fall to 155 meters in May and further drop to 146 meters in June. The water discharges were aimed both for alleviating droughts in the downstream of the Yangtze River and for making room to contain water from seasonal flooding of the river in summer, he said.

Panda Cub in Vienna

WTF Are They Thinking in China?

The Chinadaily, which is the ruling communist party mouthpiece, likes to legitimize their barbaric acts by putting a nice spin on them in the media. This is a quote from this ‘cutting edge’ media source is about China enacting new policies to cut down on judicial corruption. quote ” And the third targets lax management and poor working practices on the part of some local courts and urges court staff members, especially judicial police officers, to perform their duties in accordance with the law.” Let me highlight the part i find incredulous-“”””“urges court staff members, especially judicial police officers, to perform their duties in accordance with the law”””” Am I missing something, or shouldn’t this be rule number one in the ‘official Chinese communist court legal stuff book that you have to read before you can begin taking bribes from your constituents”? Shouldn’t there be some kind of oath that when one takes a job as a judge that one assumes to act in accordance with the law? And if this is true and China has been open for 33 years now, did they just think to enforce this little trinket? Sometimes when I read the news here I shake my head. Then I look for the nearest Starbucks and get a latte…

BO Peddling Chinese Townhomes

Not only does BO like to allegedly ‘do a few rails’ but also likes Chinese construction as well…. photo from Chinasmack

China and Her Lack of Water

Here is a shot from xinhua and oh btw we still have had no snow nor precipitation all winter long here in Beijing. Things do not look good on the ecological front here… A fishing boat flounders on a dried-up part of Xiangjiang River in Changsha, capital of Central China’s Hunan province, on Tuesday, Feb 8, 2011 after the lengthy drought that has affected much of the country lowered the level of the water. [Photo/Xinhua]

China Ok’s Sudanese Split

Originally I read about China giving the uncle C nod to the split and my initial thought was, ‘like they need yoru blessing’. Then I remembered that Sudan has some pretty sketchy crappy leaders and oil, so naturally China will be involved with them and lo and behold, lookie at what Billy Boy has found, excerpt from here by Alex Thurston: “To put this into historical context, Chinese companies have been involved in Sudanese oil production since 1996. The oil connection has fostered a military relationship, with China providing arms to the Sudanese government and Khartoum sometimes deploying troops to protect Chinese workers. In geographical context, Sudan may be “China’s largest overseas oil project” (as of 2004, so that statement may be out of date), but China’s presence in Africa is larger than just Sudan. Chinese involvement in Africa has a lot to do with oil and other resources, and these ventures expose them to backlash. For that reason this story about the killing of Chinese oil workers reminds me of other incidents where Africans have targeted Chinese: in Algeria, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Angola, to take a few examples. Sudan has carried out other executions in recent years, and at least one execution was connected with an incident where foreigners were targeted. So I don’t want to read too much into the execution this week. But it does raise questions for me about how African governments, and China, will manage African backlash against China when it occurs. If the past gives us any indication, more attacks on Chinese workers will happen, especially when contested resources are at stake. I’m not saying that China should or will leave Africa, but it seems that all the players in this equation – African governments, African communities, the Chinese government, and Chinese workers – will, in the years to come, have to deal with complex and sometimes violent politics stemming from their encounters with each other.