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There are a number of articles pointing out that the coverage of this stuff is full of holes. Here's the actual article:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a...

"Deadbeat debtors in North China's Hebei province will find it more difficult to abscond as the Higher People's Court of Hebei on Monday introduced a mini-program on WeChat targeting them. Called "a map of deadbeat debtors", the program allows users to find out whether there are any debtors within 500 meters."

First, this is a initiative by a local province, not "China". Second, it involves those who have defaulted on actual physical loans, and is completely unrelated to the "social credit" concept that the Chinese government is talking about. Additionally, many other things that are supposedly part of the social credit system, and reported as such in the West are actually privately designed and run things on Chinese social media sites run by Ali Baba and the like, and not actually ideas related to the social credit concept. (example: the thing where if you play a lot of MMOs you get rated lower on the dating apps: none of that has any connection to the Chinese government. The social media that collects the data and the dating app are both privately designed and run systems. It's like blaming the Feds for Facebook algorithms). Basically, 99% of the things that get reported as being part of the social credit concept aren't in fact part of anything run by the federal government in China. This is just a very poor l

While there are definitely questions to be answered, nobody is being well-informed about the issues if we keep getting bombarded with completely unconnected things and being told that they are "THE social credit system". The actual system proposal, from what I've read is was better translated as a "social trust system" in China since fraud is rampant and trust in local/federal government officials and private companies is rock bottom. The biggest penalties such as being blocked from luxury hotels and first-class flight were in fact proposed for company executives of companies that have breached the social credit system. The real story here, lost in the BS, is that China desperately wants to create a "trust culture" where people have faith in not only each other but government and companies. that basic trust is highly lacking, and that's really what this is all about. Doing business in China is much harder that it needs to be, because rampant fraud has led to a lack of trust. The *actual* social credit program seems more about creating a core of "trusted" entities, both public and private institutions.

Maybe the social credit ideas are completely misguided and the actual system will end up being abused and failing completely, but it really serves no purpose to get fed blatantly false headlines conflating unrelated things with the actual Chinese federal government's plans.

Check out the sales for the month around the Chinese new year, and come back to us, smartypants.

As you wish, Buttercup. One estimate of the week-long Chinese New Year is around 840 billion yuan ($140 billion) in the retail and catering industries for 2017.

Of course, this is not a beauty contest. Rather this reflects cultural behavior. Christmas in the US has culturally become a buying season. That's good for the economy and potentially bad for overstretched family budgets buying things that aren't needed. Chinese New Year is about family, eating, sweeping out the old, ushering in the new, and red envelopes. It's starting to move in the commercial, non-family direction of American Christmas observance, which is arguably also not a great thing.

China figured out how to make nuclear power economical. One thing they do to keep costs down is shoot any protestors that hold up construction.

So how do you explain the relatively small contribution of nuclear to China's energy mix in future plans ?

They are reloading?

China has 19 nuclear reactors under construction today. They plan to have 150 GWe of nuclear power capacity by 2030 by adding about 8 GWe capacity each year. It's only "relatively small" because China is big and had very little nuclear power capacity until just a few years ago. If they are successful in their plans then China will be the largest producer of nuclear power in the world before their 2030 goal.

Cite:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a...

Wasn't that already illegal? Yet the Chinese--people beyond US jurisdiction (and California's jurisdiction, despite what they seem to think)--did it anyway, yes?

Why yes. As a result, there were executions, lengthy prison terms, and various other punishments.

However "did it anyway" is a an exercise in moving the goalposts. Kohath posted "Be a grownup and make grownup choices. Then you won't need a government mommy watching out for you..." You're implying that the problem would not be worse if there were not labeling + heath & safety laws. Yet perfection is neither obtainable nor required.

As for jurisdiction... being "beyond" a jurisdiction isn't the safety net that you appear to think it is.

European governments have stopped talking about the Chinese government's human rights abuses.

Is there any evidence that "talking about" rights in China was helping? Maybe Westerners should accept that it is not their place to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese people.

The Chinese people are more likely than Americans or Europeans to trust their government, and to believe it represents their interests.

Also, an American is four times more likely to be arrested and incarcerated by their government, compared to China.

I once visited a potential software agent in France. They had a good accounting suite for IBM S/36 at the time, but I could not figure out how they had such an impressive office complex based on their small customer base.

So, I got the technical manager sauced-up one evening and its turns out the basement was full of "Minitel rose" (pink, i.e. pron) servers. This was the 1980s, and it seems that online "Johns" were spending hours - and hundreds of bucks - every month hammering away on a tiny keyboard and getting all steamed-up over scrolling black and white horny text on an equally small screen. Rather sad.

The joke was, the "best" online "sexters" were.....men! Easy money, working from home. Kinda like Chinese theatre I guess - women's roles are traditionally played by men, since "only a man knows how a woman is supposed to react". Equally sad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/c...

Credit card fraud is an AMERICAN problem. In other countries I can't spend your money just by providing semi-public information. Only Americans believe that is "the way it is supposed to be".

Not really: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/c...

And then, when it comes to debit card fraud, the United States comes in fourth place with 20% of consumers there reporting fraud in the last five years. That's behind 25% in Mexico, 24% China and 21% in India. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/10/22/countries-with-the-most-card-fraud-u-s-and-mexico/#6adaafb14708)

Just tracing the problem back. People like to portray Chinese imports as Chinese brands, not as the result of American business engineering.

While I'm often critical of how litigious our society has become, I'm also glad for it as vendors marketing Chinese made children's toys containing lead paint can be sued, whether or not they made the design decision. For a society that provides examples of extreme callousness such as bridges made of garbage, American businesses have good reason to be extremely diligent in monitoring supply lines.

Along with middle-class and minimum-wage workers who can buy more quality goods and live at a higher standard of living.

Again, with the problem of income inequality, only being able to afford chinese 'goods' even as majority of families are dual income makes a declaration of higher standard of living questionable. I fail to see how this will be a net benefit in the long run.

You don't follow world news do you.

China built 25,000km high speed rail in 5 years, through deserts, glaciers, mountain ranges, forests, how many km have the Germans built?

Chinese trains have become so good that Germany's Deutsche Bahn wants to buy them.
According to DW columnist Frank Sieren, the railway can no longer afford to give preferential treatment to German companies.
http://www.dw.com/en/sierens-c...

Chinese train technology rolls into Germany
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/w...

China is on track to build high-speed rail in just about every corner of the world
https://qz.com/292321/china-is...

France and Germany now have to team up to compete with China

France-Germany rail merger aims to take on China
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/2...
The deal aims to counter China's growing clout in global rail markets. Beijing stepped up its efforts in 2015 by merging two big companies into state-backed giant CRRC, which describes itself as "the world's largest supplier of rail transit equipment."

I'd say it's probably the latter. See, whiz kids get scholarships. Even the international ones can get scholarships and stipends.

Fu Er Dai (kids of nouveau riche) however, need to pay full price, and often do it with a newly bought American house paid in full with cash by their parents. Now, with US housing prices at historical highs, coupled with the Chinese economy cooling off, not as many families find it a good investment.

Add to this the growing perception that overseas degrees aren't worth all that much (mainly due to the fact that every dumber-than-a-brick Fu Er Dai has gotten one), and you can easily find explanations to the dip in numbers without alluding to Trump's rhetoric. And that's even without pointing out the fact that the trend started before last year's election.

There is not much difference between the European angle and the American angle. If you truly want another angle, then you will get it with sites like Al Jazeera.com, RT and Chinadaily.

The hukou class of a child can follow either the mother's or the father's.

Here is a citation that says you are wrong. A quick Google search turns up many more. Illegitimate children in China (heihaizi or "black children") are denied many basic rights of citizenship.

They literally have whole cities just lying around idle. I mean, Spain's got one, sure, but they have several. The economy never developed sufficiently to employ people in jobs that would permit them to live in developed cities in a capitalist society... so the places rot.

You are quoting gloating "China is fallin - see?" populist Daily Mail-grade articles which have little to no relevance to reality.

I.e. OMG LOOK AT THIS GHOST CITY! Silly Chinese peoples. Don't they know any thing? Their stupid, stupid brains.

Meanwhile, in reality...
It's a case of combined schadenfreude over someone's perceived failure and a situation akin to when a small turnip farmer from Lower Bumfuck comes to a BigCityTM and starts despairing at the sight of a construction yard which will surely fail cause there is no chance that 50-storey building could ever be filled with people.
He could have planted turnips there.

Ordos is actually an entire prefecture. Slightly bigger than South Carolina or Austria (86,752 km2).
Population: ~1.9 million.
Urban population: ~582,544, living in the Dongsheng District.
That region has 16% of all coal reserves in China. And a 2nd highest income-per-capita in China.
It has a textile, petrochemical, car, electricity generating and a building industry - all built on the back of all that coal.
And they are using it to rapidly urbanize the prefecture - pooling all those 1.9 million people in one place.
http://www.theatlantic.com/chi...
http://www.vagabondjourney.com...
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes...

China is urbanizing RAPIDLY. At the rate of about 1% per year.
How much is 1% out of 1.35 billion people, yearly? About an entire Los Angeles of people looking for home, food, work, running water, electricity... and generally better living conditions than back in their village.
Year after year after year...

So, China is building entire cities from scratch and half coaxing half forcing people to move there.
Not just dropping apartment buildings or giant towers and sand islands that "someone will surely buy into" either.
Those are planned cities with built-in infrastructure (including all those "empty" parks and highways) to support hundreds of thousands of people with tens of thousands pouring yearly into Ordos alone, on a 20-year urbanization plan.
Many of those people coming in quite literally from the fields.

I asked the men where they had lived before moving to their apartments in Kangbashi. One of them, a 56-year-old man named Li Yonh Xiang, spoke up. "I lived here," he said.

Li had been born and raised just steps from the bench where he was sitting. About half of the 90-acre park had belonged to his family; the government bought the land in 2000. "When we were peasants, we lived according to the weather," Li said. "Now I live in a heated building with six floors. The city is very nice. There are many cars and buildings, but the air is very clean."

By stick and by carrot both.
http://europe.chinadaily.com.c...

China's urbanization program has been forced into motion by a fiscal policy that all but demands local cities expand to remain economically solvent. According to the World Bank, China's cities must fend for 80 percent of their expenses while only receiving 40 percent of the country's tax revenue, so land sales are often used to make up the difference.

Land is bought by cit

I'm not so sure that's true because the relevant laws are set such that the penalties are so light for the wealthy violators and virtually non-existant for the most powerful participants in the system. First, the organization with the most patents is not in a position to "feel pain" as you say; IBM's power is (as they've said long ago) in cross-licensing. They said they get an order of magnitude more benefit by leveraging the power the patent scheme was built to exert (which is also part of the problem of calling organizations "patent trolls" as if leveraging that power is somehow not to be expected, or an abuse of an otherwise upright system, when in fact that power is just part of the system operating as designed). As a result, losing patent infringement lawsuits is not common for IBM. Richard Stallman laid out how this works in his patent talks many years ago:

IBM got two kinds of benefit from its 9000 US patents. I believe the number is larger today. These were first, collecting royalties and second, getting access to the patents of others. They said that the latter benefit is an order of magnitude greater. So the benefit that IBM got from being allowed to use the ideas that were patented by others was 10 times the direct benefit IBM could get from licensing patents. What does this really mean?

What is the benefit that IBM gets from this access to the patents of others? It is basically the benefit of being excused from the trouble that the patent system can cause you. The patent system is like a lottery. What happens with any given patent could be nothing, could be a windfall for some patent holder or a disaster for everyone else. But IBM being so big, for them, it averages out. They get to measure the average harm and good of the patent system. For them, the trouble of the patent system would have been 10 times the good. I say would have been because IBM through cross-licensing avoids experiencing that trouble. That trouble is only potential. It doesn't really happen to them. But when they measure the benefits of avoiding that trouble, they estimate it as 10 times the value of the money they collect from their patents.

With regard to Apple specifically, it's not that difficult to see that they get by in part by violating government-granted monopoly and they're wealthy enough to be able to afford to do it repeatedly. The people who run Apple now ran NeXT years ago. NeXT infringed the FSF's license (GPLv2) in NeXT's initially unauthorized GCC derivative in which NeXT added Objective-C support. NeXT and the FSF settled out of court when the FSF got them to comply with the terms of the GPL (lesson learned here: stand up for your strong copylefted free software licenses and the bullies will meet your terms). Apple would again violate the GPLv2 later by distributing an infringing copy of VideoLAN Client. VLC co-author Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote critically of Apple's choice to let the program through it's app store saying "Those terms are contradicted by the products usage rules of the AppStore through which Apple delivers applications to users of its mobile devices." Apple infringed upon 3 Chinese writer's copyrights and were ordered to pay 730,000 yuan ($118,000), hardly a sum that would stop Apple from doing this again. But the pattern seems clear: Apple violates laws it doesn't like and never really meets a punishment that will make the leaders of the organization question whether to do it again. Apple isn't unique in this but that is a detail; we need punishments for the wealthy and powerful that make them take the law more seriously. But most importantly for endeavors practiced by the general public, such as computer programming, we need to fight in an organized and political way to end software idea patents. Mere patent reform is a delaying tactic that benefits the powerful.

Lenovo is dual-headquartered in China and North Carolina. Which branch was responsible for planting spyware in the English language version of the OS is debatable.

In China they actually do execute corrupt corporate executives and government officials (the overlap between the two job descriptions can be extensive). See the examples of Liu Han, Zeng Chengjie, Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping, and Zheng Xiaoyu. So, yeah, heads could actually roll, if the Chinese felt that the offense was of detriment to China, but planting spyware on English-language computers probably doesn't fall into that category. In fact, someone in China is probably getting a round of free drinks.

The original Motorola deal included 17,000 patents. Google says it's retaining the vast majority, but China Daily is reporting that Lenovo will be receiving 10,000 of them, suggesting that Google is merely retaining a license to those patents, rather than retaining ownership of them. If so, then that would limit their ability to use those 10,000 patents quite a bit.

They didn't "rent" anything -- they paid $10 billion for Motorola's patents.

Actually, other reporting on the issue suggests that over 10,000 out of the 17,000 or so patents are part of the deal too. Larry Page said in his post that they'll be "retaining" the "vast majority" of the patents, but I'm seeing it suggested elsewhere that that may be intended to mean "retaining a license to", rather than "retaining ownership of". Alternatively, maybe it's Google getting the lion's share of the patents, with Lenovo taking the smaller portion and the reporting being a bit off. Either way, it's looking like Google is selling off their ownership for a large number of the patents in question, so if they paid $10B for them, they did it for only a subset of the patents.

But if you really believe their is a chance that drones are going to be dropping packages off at you doorstep in under 10 - 15 years, you neither understand the logistics and you are both delusional and naive. Set down the Adderal and the Code Red. Maybe light some incense and listen to some Tibetan singing bowls or something.

Speaking of Tibetan singing bowls and doorsteps if your doorstep is in the USA maybe not. But if Tibet is near your doorstep maybe...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57601531-76/drones-in-china-deliver-packages-even-a-birthday-cake/
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/02/amazon-is-joining-not-starting-the-drone-delivery-revolution/
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/tech/2013-09/03/content_16941199.htm

Not saying it's a good idea. Just pointing out that drones may be dropping packages off sooner than you think, depending on where your doorstep is.
quote from the last link:

Currently several major Chinese couriers like S.F.Express have expanded to counties or even villages. But there are still areas that are more remote or with poor transport infrastructure. It is expected the drones will be useful for delivering online shopping goods to those places.

By chance, a few weeks ago I saw a documentary about SARS in China.

Remember that the 2008 Olympics were to be in Beijing, and so Chinese authorities in 2002 tried everything to avoid inflicting any tiny bit of fear in the tourists coming to China. They tried at first to admit there was an epidemics, and along the way declared many SARS fatalities as due to other causes. The things become more transparent (i.e. the official numbers were more realistic) when the medical community all over the country began to put a strong pressure. Many doctors were victims because when SARS started the hospitals didn't have equipment to protect them conveniently. But today no one really can tell the "true" number of SARS victims (and also of infected people) in China, and that biases the global SARS statistics, of course.

But the documentary was not about the deaths: it was about the survivors that have been treated in hospitals. In fact, the standard treatment was to deploy huge amounts of cortisone in the infected and that, AFAIR, stops blood flow in bones (among other secondary effects) and so many bone parts died in the patients in the forthcoming months and years. Some people have already gone into surgery many times (up to a dozen or so, in some cases) to patch those dead bones and other injuries in joints, many are in wheelchairs and in some cases they are sorts of abandoned by family and authorities. Some have already died, or even committed suicide.

It was said that the "cortisone" treatment was in China only, other countries (such as Canada, which had a bunch of deaths) didn't follow those medical guidelines.

Couldn't google the documentary name but just found an article about the issue: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-01/07/content_9276884.htm

Final words: many survivors are still severely crippled from SARS. For them the SARS epidemics didn't end in a few months. And local medical practices still make a strong impact in the quality of life of the patients.

The next big opportunity for LTE-related upgrading business is China, Ericsson having cashed in huge in the United States. What China desperately wants is for the TD-LTE variant that is being deployed on China Mobile to become an equal alternative to the FDD-LTE already deployed in say the US. They are willing to let the Europeans cash in and not just leave the business to home-grown companies such as Huawei, showing how eager the Chinese are becoming for European assistance.

Did Apple steal other people's ideas, or did someone else defraud Apple by submitting someone else's work to iBooks as his or her own? I'm getting hints from an article in China Daily that it may have been the latter.

Agreed. Article says someone else uploaded the books to Apple and those people were profiting from it. Sounds like Apple was an innocent 3rd party, like if I uploaded copyrighted works to Youtube and Youtube gets sued for sharing it instead of me getting sued.

Also, China has copyright laws? Home of bootleg movies and fake purses? Guess those laws only apply to foreign companies, not when China is stealing stuff from other countries.

Did Apple steal other people's ideas, or did someone else defraud Apple by submitting someone else's work to iBooks as his or her own? I'm getting hints from an article in China Daily that it may have been the latter.

The China Daily article "Copyrights take a bite out of Apple" quotes someone: "The verification must rely on human power." It states that the judge assumed that all service providers should have known the entire text of all bestsellers: "'The writers involved this time include Mai Jia, whose books are often on best-seller lists across the country,' he said. 'In this way, Apple has the capability to know the uploaded books on its online store violated the writer's copyright.'" It appears that China lacks a counterpart to the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), the arguably "good" part of the DMCA, namely a standardized takedown procedure that online service providers can rely on to avoid liability for copyright infringements committed by their users. (A recent ruling against Grooveshark showed that the United States also appears to lack this for pre-1972 sound recordings.)

Just get out of China.

But keep sending your food.

And keep sending us your industry.

Oh, your tech too. Keep sending that.

Otherwise, just stay the hell out, round-eye.

> CFCs were replaced with hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) ...
> the problem was economically solved for the most part.

Excep that HCFC turns out to be more of a problem
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/25090702.asp

HCFC Phaseout Schedule | Ozone Layer Protection - Regulatory ...
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/title6/phaseout/hcfc.html
To learn more about the HCFC phaseout, including frequently asked questions, please visit this link.

Producing HCFC-22 also produces, as a byproduct, HCF-23.

Oops. oversight in the initial protocol? Or clever loophole-drafting?
China gets paid for destroying HCF-23.
And it hasn't been against the rules to produce more, to get paid more to destroy more of the stuff.
So they ramped up HCFC-22 production instead of going with alternatives that didn't make money quite so fast.

"China is, in fact, gaming the system today as we speak by
producing harmful HCFC-22 for the sole reason of destroying
HCF-23 by-product ..."
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg44428/html/CHRG-110hhrg44428.htm

China was very happy with that situation, but is quite unhappy with the next step, stopping the production completely:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-09/17/content_15761265.htm
read down the text beyond the self-congratulations to the part where they say the next step is, well, very, very difficult.

Yeah, giving up free money is always hard. Read the fine print -- more carefully ....

It's more about people boycotting Japanese products, than the government blocking Japanese imports. Japan and China have a troublesome history, especially after World War 2, so any sovereignty issues will flare up in the same fashion.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2012-11/20/content_15946209.htm

Gray market seeks way around iPhone 5 restrictions

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/2012-09/20/content_15770744.htm

It's really a battle for unlocked mobile phones that don't have registered users. Locked-in phones have your government ID registered.

Same think happened to someone Iranian:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/06/21/does-apple-actually-understand-the-export-restriction-laws/

Every big country wants to be top dog, or a superpower.

China has wanted this for some time.

They fought a number of proxy wars against the USA, including the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In the former, Chinese troops met American troops in combat. In the latter, China provided weapons, equipment, aid and advisors to the North Vietnamese communist armies.

China is now building F-22 clones for its airforce, has a new carrier for its Navy, is waging constant and active cyber warfare against the US, and is expanding its trade strategy to dominate the US.

The war is cold now, but eventually it will be hot. Hold onto your hats.

Seriously, here is a story about a recent riot because a concert was late in starting. That country is very riot-friendly right now.

The world (especially voters and politicians) believe in nutjob armageddon/rapture bullshit and are hell-bent on making sure it happens as soon as possible

Let me help you out there -

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, AKA the Soviet Union, governed by the religion suppressing atheistic Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" operated according to the "scientific principles" of Marxist-Leninism, built an actual Doomsday weapon, that is still active: Soviet Doomsday Device Still Armed and Ready and Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine.. Apparently secular socialist progressive totalitarians are just as crazy as anyone else. Salud.

Related: Moscow arms against nuclear attack

Nearly 5,000 new emergency bomb shelters will be built in Moscow by 2012 to save people in case of potential attacks.

Out of sight but not out of mind

William Burrows’ classic 1986 book about satellite reconnaissance, Deep Black, opened with a vivid scene of retired US Air Force Major General George Keegan recounting how in the early 1970s he had become obsessed with Soviet civil defense preparedness. As head of Air Force intelligence, Keegan had ordered his junior officers to gather all the satellite photography that they could of Soviet underground shelter building. Eventually he compiled a massive amount of data indicating—he claimed—that virtually every large apartment building erected in the Soviet Union since 1955 included a fallout shelter, factories had underground bunkers, and there were “seventy-five huge underground command posts.” A few of these underground facilities housed command centers for the Strategic Rocket Forces and were buried in the Ural Mountains. In particular, Yamantau Mountain (“Evil Mountain” in the local Bashkir language) and Kosvinsky Mountain were considered to be the Soviet equivalents to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, home to NORAD (not to mention the W.O.P.R. and the Stargate).

Shelters part of long-term civil defense plan - Shanghai leaders stress the date of 2012 is purely a coincidence
Assessing PLA Underground Air Basing Capability

Bunkers for all

Switzerland is unique in having enough nuclear fallout shelters to accommodate its entire population, should they ever be needed.

IKEA in Hell - The interior design of Sweden’s giant nuclear bunker.

Israeli leaders spend day in 'Nation's Tunnel' nuclear bunker

The frightening truth of why Iran wants a bomb

According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World. In every generation, the Imam chooses 36 men, (and, for obvious reasons, no women) naming them the owtad or "nails", whose presence, hammered into mankind's existence, prevents the universe from "falling off". Although the "nails" are not known to common mortals, it is, at

Oh, they've got themtoo.

The native speaker was also fluent in English, having lived and worked in England for over 25 years, and understands my dietary wishes pretty well having been married to me for over 20 of those years. Yes, there were non-meat dishes on the menus, but they were cooked in the same broth as the meat and fish or the same wok, and usually had bits of meat in them anyway, so stuff that I was assured was meat-free was no such thing. See this article, for example, about the problems of trying to get vegetarian food in Beijing. Hong Kong is well served for Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, and I use them extensively, but it seems that (as a result of decades of religious suppression?) Beijing is nowhere near so well served.

This is one of the burdens pioneering women have placed on them: people are always second-guessing them, wondering whether they got their position on the merits or if are being given special treatment because they are women. Minorities often get a similar response ("oh s/he only got the job because of affirmative action"). Hence the saying "you've got to be at least twice as good as anyone else to be accepted as equal".

In this case, it is worse. There was an article a couple of months ago that said they had a bunch of female candidates to choose from and they (a) delibertely picked a woman and (b) her looks were part of the criteria (no scars).

Huh? Huai'an city is not in Hainan. It's in Jiangsu province, about 100km west of Shanghai. Hainan is an island off the southern coast of China, near Vietnam.

The China Daily article says there are two separate projects. Foxconn is both building this plant in Huai'an and starting up a new manufacturing base down in Hainan. The Hainan facility is not necessarily Apple-oriented.

Conventional records:

World record soybeans, 2010, 160.6 bu/acre * 60 lbs/bu = 9,636 lbs/acre
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/10/prweb4636574.htm

World record rice, 2011, 13.5 tons/hectare = 10,927 lbs/acre
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-09/20/content_13737437.htm

World record corn, 2002, 442 bu/acre * 70 lbs/bu = 30,940 lbs/acre (being generous, assuming ear corn)
burkstractor.com/eq_brochures/Case.../SeedNewsMar292006.pdf
(granted, not as good a source. find a better one)

World record wheat
World record wheat, 2010, 15.637 tons/hectare = 12,656 lbs/acre
http://www.meattradenewsdaily.co.uk/news/190310/nz___record_wheat_yield_.aspx

(lbs/bushel figures taken from http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G4020)

Now compare with the Dervaes family, doing permaculture in Pasadena on 1/10 of an acre. All years from 2003-2009 inclusive (newer data isn't posted) are between 4,000 lbs and 6,000 lbs on 1/10 of an acre. So 40K - 60K lbs/acre annually. That's better than world record yields on a regular basis.

As in, if they don't like their government, or if they are okay with it.

I suspect Chinese feel their government is much better now that it isn't starving tens of millions of people to death or commiting widespread violent political persecution especially given that over 100 million Chinese have been brought out of absolute poverty.

But at some point, these relative enhancements in government performance may no longer seem enough.

Proximity to the Somali pirates (http://www.google.com/search?q=somali+pirates)... Sigh.

How fun isn't that compared to other nuclear wielding states.

Still, "Kenya optimistic for Somali peace prospects": http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2012-01/09/content_14405037.htm

Sayyari rejected reports about a possible one-day closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the exercise, adding that Iranian forces are capable of accomplishing such a feat, but such a decision must be made by the nation's leaders.

  - http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-12/26/content_14324816.htm

When the Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral says that they could close the straight if they wanted to that counts (well to everyone except you I guess) as mentioning closing something.

Or is the China Daily "american sensasionalist media" in your strange world?

China’s rapid emissions growth and global climate change policy table 8.1 lists China's emissions growth 2000-05 as 10.6% p.a. If continued, this rate means a doubling of emissions in approximately 7 years. If you take figures published in China of 33.6% between 2006-10, equating to a 7.5% p.a. growth, or a doubling period of approximately 10 years (6.0% and ~12 years if you treat that as a 5 yr period). Contrast that with figures for Australia which are essentially flat this year (-0.4%).

or [the US could] compete on quality like the Germans

Does that mean the US will get to impose hundreds of anti-dumping duties on Chinese imports like Germany?

EU extends China anti-dumping duty for barium carbonate
EU levies stiff anti-dumping tariffs [on ceramic tiles]
Chinese exporters regret EU anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made screws, bolts
Germany's SolarWorld expects anti-dumping complaints vs China
EU Hits China with Anti-Dumping Duties on Paper
EU greenlights anti-dumping duties on Chinese light bulbs
EU Extended Anti-Dumping Duties on Chinese Bicycle Imports

You see, while German manufacturers and workers are busy competing 'on quality', as you say, the German government is actively protecting domestic industry from competition with China throughout the EU. German manufacturers and German workers do not have to compete with disposable Asian workers and indifferent health/safety/labor/environmental regulation.

The 'oh-noes trade war' sentiment that we get from pro-business types and Chinese ministers is a farce. We're in a trade war. We're getting our clocks cleaned. That is the real reason we have thousands of 'business' degree graduates in their late 20s shuffling around trying to 'occupy' Wall Street. The US no longer provides the real growth necessary to accommodate them. They are surplus people; their futures went to China.

There is already little room left for China to further slash sulfur emissions, said the ministry source. By the end of 2009, about 71 percent of coal-fired power plants had been equipped with sulfur scrubbers, compared to 12 percent back in 2005. "The next step is to take a closer look at whether these facilities are actually put into use," he said.
Read article and you will see a number of inconsistencies. SO2 goes down, but NOx goes up? Nope. Likewise, SO2 goes down, but more and more damage is occurring? Nope.
When my friends did the study, they agreed to not publish. So, not published. The problem is that the numbers that they came up with absolutely do NOT match what is claimed by the ministry. However, the Chinese ministry KNOWS that (which is why they forbid the publishing; they wanted the correct numbers and technology, but that was figured out at the end of the trip when all of their packed gear disappeared, though not personal luggage; the gear is used for monitoring much our national and state land). The issue is that turning this stuff on would actually drop their SO2 and NOx a great deal, BUT, it costs something like 10-20% efficiency. China is more than 80% coal based for electricity. Imagine if we lost 8-16% of our electricity. Anywhere in the west, it would be TIGHT. In china, they are already tight. It would be catastrophic to their ability to subsidize their energy and dump. So, China will continue to pollute. They absolutely have ZERO intention of turning on emissions control. NONE.

Likewise, they will continue to dump in the oceans. Their attitude is turning to one that other nations are buying their stuff so we can absorb the pollution as well.

Read it here: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2011-08/11/content_13095102.htm

FTA: "The Ministry of Public Administration and Security is set to report to ruling party lawmakers about comprehensive measures to protect personal information online, including abolishing the real-name registration system, Yonhap news agency said."

Also, this says the system was in effect since 2007 :)

The US is better at building airplanes than Taiwan is.

Is the US better at building airplanes than China?

This symmetry of trade is a fiction that exists exclusively inside your head. The migration of airliner manufacturing is underway now, along with anything else we can figure out how to do in Asia, including major pieces of our infrastructure. US industry has no protection from hordes of disposable Asian workers and indifferent regulation. While this situation persists the evacuation of capital to Asia, or whatever hell-hole replaces it, will continue.

Since when did this international campusing became the vogue?

U. California Los Angels at Shanghai anyone?

Universities have been setting up international campuses and research centers for quite a while now... Unfortunatly the UC system is broke (as it depends on the State of California for funding) so you won't be seeing a UC-S campus anytime soon, but NYU (a private university) is taking the plunge in china...

Story is probably not true. China Daily runs stories that are obviously not true but carry some important moral just about every single day - http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.php?gid=2&tid=684280 discusses one classic.

That said, it's believable:
1) Foreign adoption for money, with foreign adopters not realizing it's illegal, just think they're paying adoption fees and/or standard kickbacks.
2) Buying a kid or even a wife is accepted in large parts of China, which let's face it is pretty fucking backwards despite a few Potemkin city centers. 300 million Chinese people live in caves.

No link to original source? And original source is supposedly Chinese state-run media??

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

Here is a link from the English China Daily which is state run. And here's a tabloid branch of the People's Daily running the story but usually this paper focuses on global issues.

If China is so beholden to capitalists, then why does it have so many purely economic crimes punished by death? e.g.:

- Fund-raising frauds
- Financial instrument frauds
- Letter of credit frauds
- Credit-card frauds

and what about all these guys who actually face (or, in some cases, already received) the bullet despite being "filthy rich"?

In truth, there are two headlines on this topic. The first is: Police arrest 25 to quell unrest in S China town http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-06/12/content_12678431.htm .

The Second is: Unfounded rumor sends local crowd into frenzy http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-06/13/content_12679447.htm .

These are just the English news sources.

In truth, there are two headlines on this topic. The first is: Police arrest 25 to quell unrest in S China town http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-06/12/content_12678431.htm .

The Second is: Unfounded rumor sends local crowd into frenzy http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-06/13/content_12679447.htm .

These are just the English news sources.

India:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_India

China:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-05/26/content_12580470.htm

China is starting to suffer brownouts due to policy to limit coal. China is using 50% of world coal production.

http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/ieo/world.html

I will disagree with EIA about coal in China. There is currently a new policy that says no more new coal power plants unless they replace old coal plants. New coal plants have to be more efficient too (eg. combined cycle, or coal gassification). China will also run out of its coal reserves within 30 years at current extraction rates.

China cannot grow coal because lack of the resource - they are become one of the largest importers of coal. This is expecting to cause brownouts this summer,

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/05/energy-shortages-spreading-rationing-in.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/30/us-china-power-price-idUSTRE74T1TG20110530

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43219200

I ask not to argue, but to have something to slap in the faces of all the treehuggers...

You can say I am a treehugger - a nuclear treehugger ;) I view fossil based energy sources as vastly more damaging than nuclear. I would prefer that fusion be available, but alas, you have to do with what you have. Renewables are OK but there is a problem when you have 8 billion people and each one wants to have their energy (transport, heat, air conditioning, food, etc).

Energy independence is paramount and if nuclear is the only option for base-load non-CO2 emitting energy source, then I have no choice but welcome nuclear.

Frankly, I don't know what the "green" crowd (anti-everything crowd these days - can't call them rational anymore) wants. In Germany now they are protesting that they don't want the power lines to move power from north to south because they look ugly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13257804
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,757658,00.html