Tag: china

The Jasmine Revolution

several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This has been motivated, of course, by events in MENA, and the timing has been significant because it has coincided with 2 important political conferences in Beijing, but it appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.

trolling the chinese security apparatus

Shanghai Expo

Organizers of Shanghai’s World Expo have been holding trial runs this week. Officials now estimate the 6-month event, themed “Better City, Better Life”, will attract up to 100m visitors, 95% of them Chinese. Shanghai has spent $58.6b preparing for the Expo – more than was spent on the Beijing Olympics. Collected here are photographs of last-minute preparations in Shanghai as they prepare to welcome the world this weekend.

world expos are so weird. what is on display / sale here? competing 70s-era utopias?

Engineering Leadership

The senior body of China’s Communist Party is the Politburo’s standing committee. Making up its 9 members are 8 engineers, and 1 lawyer. This is not a relic of the past: 2007 saw the appointments of 1 petroleum and 2 chemical engineers. The last American president to train as an engineer was Herbert Hoover. Why do different countries favor different professions? And why are some professions so well represented in politics?

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking.

China bailing out US

The Chinese government could offer to lend up to $500b (from its current stock of $1800b) to the US government for the rescue of its financial sector. Its previous assistance – buying US bonds – was indirect and unconditional. Not so in this case. China’s loan offer would be direct to the US government to be spent in the current financial crisis. More important, it would come with strings attached. Tied aid, the preferred mode of operation of western donors since the postwar period, would now be embraced by China. What would be the nature of the strings – or “conditionality” as the US Treasury, a longtime practitioner of this art, has called it? Conditionality as imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund was underpinned by an ideology that favored markets and globalisation. But there was also an assumption that either borrowing third world governments did not understand their benefits or the reformers there needed a “spoonful of sugar” to help overcome any internal opposition.

Of course the jingoism is such that the US would rather go down than accept this plan.