Asia

From Hong Kong blogger Roland Soong, here’s a wrap-up of the coverage (and noncoverage) of Hong Kong politician Ma Lik’s recent claim that the June 4, 1989 killings in Beijing don’t qualify as a massacre. Soong has also translated a couple posts by newspaper reporters who were present at Ma’s chat. Their attitude is one of resigned …

Vice premier Wu Yi has a piece under her name on today’s OP ED page in the Wall Street Journal, trying to get China’s message out in advance of next week’s talks in Washington. It’s linked here
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117935928306905535.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Frog in a Well, a group of collaborative Asian history blogs, has posted a fascinating series of U.S. State Department documents from 1945-50. The material, which was compiled by Harvard PhD student Konrad Lawson, includes a request by Communist general Zhu De for a $20 million wartime loan from the U.S., a series of U.S. propaganda …

Back to numbers. I forgot to mention, in reference to Bill’s 1.8 million manufacturing jobs lost from the U.S. to China, that in our briefing at Diaoyutai (which by the way means “Fishing Deck” hence my lame headline) we were told that according to calculations by somebody whose name I didn’t catch U.S. consumers have saved $600 billion …

To the state guest house Diaoyutai yesterday for a briefing on the upcoming talks between the U.S. and China on prickly trade and economic issues. A bunch of reporters from U.S. publications sat on one side of long table and chomped our way through a 8 course feast ranging from stewed duck and mushrooms to steak and pea soup as senior …

Hong Kong is quickly approaching the 10th anniversary of its return to China, and for the most part things seem rosy. The economy is up, unemployment is down, no mysterious diseases or financial crises are wreaking havoc. And yet something keeps popping up that reflects Hong Kong’s continuing uncertainty as a place in China. That …

It’s a miracle. In the “debate” (and I used that word advisedly, these things are not real “debates”) last night among the Republican candidates for President in the United States, one of the questions actually had to do with China!
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the question was directed at one of the …

A further thought on 2008, the Olympics and the outside world: one of things Beijing is no doubt grateful for is that China is NOT, at least for now, an issue in the American 2008 presidential campaign. As far as foreign affairs, it’s pretty much all Iraq all the time right now. (If you want evidence of this, listen to Tim Russert’s …

As Simon wrote below, between now and and the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, one of the most interesting spectator sports is going to be how the world tries to muscle in and influence Chinese policies that some find objectionable (Tibet, Darfur, environmental degradation etc etc)–and China’s efforts to deflect that pressure. This has …

I was just up in Beijing, for the first time since last summer, and came across something small but revolutionary: polling, in the airport. So it’s not quite universal suffrage. It’s more surveying than ballot casting. And it’s to appraise the performance of passport control, not state leaders. But I’ll take it.

The first clue was the …

The China Daily, an English-language, government run paper, reported some scary stnumbers today in a story about China’s current stock market frenzy. In Shanghai alone, the paper said, some $9.1 billion was transferred from savings accounts to stock trading accounts in the first four months of the year. The main market index has risen …

Following on from Bill Powell’s post below about the fake People’s Daily editor, it is well worth noting that while there are undoubtedly many con artists like this around, branding someone a fake or extortionist pretending to be a reporter is a well worn tactic used by the local authorities when they wish to rid themselves of pesky …

Uriel Sinai / Getty

As Bill Powell says, the Darfur issue –the picture above is of a refugee being treated in a camp in neighboring Chad— is going to haunt Beijing until the Olympics. Now it appears that the cadres are waking up to the fact they may have a problem and beginning the diplomatic dance necessary to deal with it. A …