Chicom Soldiers On Parade

Ai Weiwei and China

From here By GUY VERHOFSTADT AND EDWARD MCMILLAN-SCOTT The disappearance of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and political activist, has rightly caused an international storm—and exposed the double standards that pass for foreign policy in Brussels and Washington. In our case the blow is a personal one: Meeting this mild-mannered genius on separate occasions, we have both been struck by his extraordinary courage. It is not the case that he thinks his prestige and wealth allow him to describe the Beijing regime as “disgusting.” He has been harassed and beaten up for speaking out, whether on the infanticide of the Sichuan earthquake or the powdered-milk scandal. Such a towering figure is indeed a threat to the Beijing gerontocracy, as much as Andrei Sakharov was in denouncing the Soviet Union from 1968 and inspiring the Helsinki process as we grew up. The galaxy of courageous dissidents—many of them artists such as Shostakovich or Solzhenitzyn—included Sakharov’s wife Yelena Bonner and Natan Sharansky. Their heirs are to be found in the dungeons of Cairo and the forced-labor camps spread across China. Many are still unknown, while some, such as Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo or the Christian human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, are being championed by the international human-rights community. The popular revolutions in North Africa are the latest wave in a sea of change that has swept the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Beijing, they are causing unprecedented consternation because for the first time there is a generation without fear, linked in their hundreds of thousands by new technologies of which they—not the autocrats—are the masters. We each visited Cairo recently, meeting the bloggers who orchestrated the revolution in the region’s most important country. Despite the meddling by the military, we are convinced that Egypt will succeed in delivering democracy, human rights and the rule of law. However, it is not just in Beijing that the Arab spring causes anxiety. In Brussels and Washington the replacement of “stability” by the glorious variety of democracy has caught many politicians and diplomats in unwelcome disarray—and worse, a massive display of double standards. When President Barack Obama spoke to the Arab world from Cairo’s American University (itself the source of much recent activism) in June 2009, he raised hopes around the world by saying that democracy was preferable to stability. But this new approach was not nourished by any U.S. action. Likewise, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton subsequently told her Chinese hosts in early 2009 that reform is trumped by economic security, she must have warmed many brutal and paranoid hearts in the world’s oldest tyranny. The State Department’s report detailing China’s human-rights abuses, published earlier this month, indicates Washington’s inconsistent stance. When Catherine Ashton, the head of the EU’s new “foreign ministry,” told the European Parliament last June that human rights and democracy would be central to her work, she raised hopes that Brussels would become more muscular, becoming the answer to Henry Kissinger’s question, “Who do I call when I want to call Europe?” Many gave Ms. Ashton the benefit of the doubt during the upheavals in the Arab world, which are in what the EU calls its “neighborhood.” But when she chaired the meeting of the EU’s foreign ministers last week, they failed to find time to discuss a new EU approach to human rights, even though this was one of the main purposes of the meeting. She has plainly been operating at the lowest common denominator, but does it have to be this low? The limp “concern” expressed by both Washington and the EU about Ai Weiwei’s detention typifies this approach. And when EU ministers issued equal reprimand to the security forces in Bahrain as to the demonstrators, after the government had called in Saudi reinforcements and closed the hospitals, we were aghast. Freedom House records a fifth consecutive year of decline in the number of “free” countries. The Arab revolutions may reverse this. Indeed, Ai Weiwei’s arrest is part of a crackdown on hundreds of lawyers and bloggers since the attempt to start a Jasmine Revolution in China. Washington and Brussels must get to grips with their past complicity and rouse themselves from their current complacency. A joint U.S.-EU initiative to raise the stakes on human-rights abuses in China at the U.N. Human Rights Council is a logical next step. Libya’s ejection from the council showed the way ahead. A suspension of American and European human-rights dialogues with China should be the response to Ai Weiwei’s disappearance. Stands of principle, while allowing legitimate commerce to flourish, are the way the Cold War was won. The EU and the U.S. should stand unequivocally behind reformists in the world’s remaining tyrannies. —Mr. Verhofstadt is leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (ALDE) group in the European Parliament and was Belgian prime minister from 1999 to 2008. Mr. McMillan-Scott (ALDE) is vice-president of the European Parliament responsible for democracy and human rights.

China Pic

From here http://www.superpoop.com

Year of the Rabbit

funny comic from http://www.superpoop.com/archives/2008/Jan/

Chinese in space

from here

Another Month Another Chinese Haircut

Got my haircut tonight so once again I had to venture off to the local salon travelblog.org where sampan my trusty hair master cutter man should be waiting for me funnycoloring.com unfortunately, upon arriving he was not perched on any of the stools nor sneaking a smoke with his ilk, which does’n’t matter as he is not worth much of a shit lately (btw I’ve worked 15 days striaght and in a shitty mood) so Dim sum is gone and get an ‘old hand’ as the Chinese say , not knowing that that fking phrase went out of use at about the time blacks were considered 4/5 of a vote to their owners, but I digress. So I’m, pissed but tired and Im like ok, just give me the old hand. So some guy who looks over 30 wobbles over english.cri.cn And Im scared shitless, thinking he’s going to pull some David Carridine crap with me and slash my face or something. But the guy is cool and its almost hypnotic staring into those dull white eyeballs. soulsword.com so the old guy grunts like ‘hey ‘playa’ you filthy barbarian, you down for a cut?” and im freaked out by those pusy peepers so i’m like ‘yeah Ma jang, you old man. strap on some Depends cuz you aint stopping till i look pimp….” So the old guy gets after it. I pull out my phone to show him how i like my locks, and again he grunts and then like a freaking ninja, he does his stuff. he’s taking so much time i wanna kick his zipper, I’m thinking come on uncle joe you’re moving kinda slow. and this old guy just keeps wheezing and doing his thing and humming some crazy Chinese tune he probably learnt in between ass kickings at some god forsaken village in Gansu about 50 years ago. So he’s going on and on and just about the time i wanna yank the shears from his crumpled up old fingers and give him what for, he’s done. he asks for my cell so once again i show him the pic and he touches up my cut a bit then the old sob backs up and bows and spins me around in the chair…. and all Im thinking is wtf did the old man do to me.. my new ‘do toonpool.com

China’s Energy Demand Exceeds Supply- Problems for The Summer of ‘011

From wantchinatimes.com ” China’s economic planner is braced for the possibility of rolling blackouts this summer. Picture: A child studies by candlelight. (File Photo/Xinhua) A large portion of China could face serious problems in electricity supply given the warmer-than-average weather experienced so far this year, according to the National Development and Reform Commission. Increasing demand for electricity supply will most likely result in supply shortages in the eastern, northern and southern parts of the country, the commission reported on its official website. Hong Fu-yuan, president of Formosa Chemicals and Fibre Corp, said that several Taiwan-based corporations doing business in China are concerned about the issue. The area in China with the largest concentration of Taiwanese businessmen — Dongguan and Shenzhen in Guangdong province — could face electricity supply shortages of up to one million kilowatts if authorities do not complete the new power grid construction project by this summer. Meanwhile, the East China Electrical Power Group Corporation (ECEPGC) estimates an expected peak summer demand of 190 million kilowatts this year in the eastern part of the nation. That would mean a shortage of up to 11.66 million kilowatts, according to the state-owned corporation. Chen Gang, deputy general manager of the State Grid Corporation of China of Jiangsu province, also said extremely hot conditions could push up electricity demand to as high as 7.6 million kilowatts in Nanjing this summer — an increase of 13% compared with the same period last year. It could also mean a supply shortage of of up to one million kilowatts, he said.

blog.loadingdata.nl/——–Daniel WTF?-

Daniel whats up with your site? I have to signed in to wordpress to comment?????? I have a domain name for you I checked go-daddy its available….I am serious

China to Create Millions of “Quality” Homes

The following is from here. The background for the piece is that in China, one must have a home, it’s of paramount importance. In order to placate the peons who have less of a chance to purchase homes as the chicoms are buying all the good land, the chicoms are ‘throwing a bone to the commoner’. The chicoms are building low cost housing for the less affluent. If you have ever been to china this idea would make you cringe. Chinese buildings are like Chinese, they look about one-half of a century older than they are. In my place in NYC, which was maybe 80 years old, the construction was better, the smell was better and the quality was better than the 2 and four 4 old places I have lived in, in Beijing. So imagine, if I am living in pretty good neighborhoods with what a Chinese person would call good quality, but to me its not suitable for canine life, then what will these ‘low cost homes’ be built of. In my mind I see walls with the thickness and durability of a Saltine cracker, just waiting to crumble at the first tremble of mother earth- kinda like what happened in sichuan in ’08. excerpt from here: “Beijing – Worries arose over the quality of the buildings put up as part of China’s social housing program for the poor after substandard walls were found in a project for shantytown dwellers in Baotou city, the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. The project, in the Binhe district and developed by the Shenhua Group Corp Ltd (Shenhua Group), was specially constructed for shantytown dwellers in Shiguai district, a main coalfield area in the city. The 1,200,000-square-meter project contains 226 buildings, which can accommodate 39,000 people, as well as a school and a hospital, according to the company’s website. Work on the project lasted for two years and finished in 2010. More than 5,000 families have since moved in. Doubts began to form over the quality of the buildings when 451 families living there complained that the surface of their walls had cracked and peeled off in places, Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday. “The walls easily peel when I touch them and small pieces of plaster from the walls break up very easily,” Huang Shaoting, a local resident who moved in in September, told Xinhua. “I spent all my savings and borrowed another 70,000 yuan ($10,756) from my relatives and my child for the apartment. I planned to live a happy life in the new house, and I never thought I would be faced with troubles arising from poor construction right after I had moved in.”(The wall peels off) partly because of the use of too much mortar, an additive which helps cement become sticky, so it can easily be daubed on the wall,” an insider in the building industry, who requested anonymity, told China Daily on Sunday. Mortar is often used because it is cheap, he added.By Saturday, crews had made repairs to substandard walls in 293 of the project’s houses. The renovation work will be finished in the next few days, the developer told Xinhua. In recent years, China has moved faster to build housing projects for poor residents. In 2010, the country began putting up 5.9 million subsidized apartments for low-income residents and shantytown dwellers, building 100,000 more houses than it had first planned. And the construction of a further 10 million apartments will begin this year, according to official figures. With the progress have come concerns from the public about the projects’ construction quality and about the living conditions inside them. Those have been bolstered by media reports saying that some houses have been shoddily constructed or built in remote places. In December 2010, a 107,000-square-meter subsidized housing project in Wuhan, capital of Central China’s Hubei province, was found to have been built on land polluted by a chemical plant that had once occupied the site.”

Chinese Retirement Plan in a Photo

The number of millionaires in China rose by 9.7 % last year, according to the Asia times, unfortunately, so did the geni coefficient. When the chasm between the haves and the have nots continues, people get frustrated. Frustrated people are a concern to any country.