Monthly Archives: May 2011
Bailing Out China’s Indebted Local Governments
This falls into the important if true category: Reuters reports that China’s regulators plan to move 2 trillion-3 trillion yuan ($308 million-462 million) of debt off local government’s books. This Bystander has highlighted before the potential debt bomb waiting to … Continue reading
Lead Poisonings Prompt Nationwide Shut Down Of Battery Factories
We have been reading reports since at least the beginning of this year that battery factories have been closed down because they are causing lead poisoning in children (this one via BBC). Now it appears the situation has deteriorated to … Continue reading
Filed under Environment, industry, Product Safety
Drought Worsens, Three Gorges May Run Short Of Relief Water
The drought in central and southern China, now spreading east along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze river has affected more than 5% of the country’s farmland, officials say. That is 7 million hectares of crops, with approaching … Continue reading
Filed under Environment
Improving China’s Accounting Standards: Progress Report
Financial and accounting standards in China need to converge with global practices as the country becomes increasingly integrated with the world economy. Regulatory agencies are working on just that but there is mighty long way to go, both in bringing … Continue reading
Filed under industry
Online Gold Farming: The Next Front In Trade Wars?
This Bystander hadn’t much thought of the commerce in virtual goods having the potential to become an international trade issue, but a report in the Guardian about prisoners being made to spend endless hours playing online games so that their … Continue reading
Yangtze River Drought Reaches Shanghai
The lingering drought in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, the worst in half a century, has reached Shanghai with officials saying that local reservoirs can barely meet demand and that saltwater is getting into freshwater acquirers as … Continue reading
Filed under Environment
A Rare Sighting Of North Korea’s ‘First Lady’ In Nanjing
The visit of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, though it hasn’t, as is customary, much troubled the attentions of state media, has excited social media. An employee at an LCD factory Kim visited on the outskirts of Nanjing this … Continue reading
Filed under China-Koreas, Media
Avon Investigated For Bribing Chinese Officials
Word from our man in New York that Federal prosecutors are looking into allegations that employees of Avon Products, the door-to-door direct-marketing company, bribed Chinese officials. According to a regulatory filing by the company, four employees–three of them from the … Continue reading
Filed under China-U.S., Politics & Society
Opening More Top IMF Jobs To China And Other Brics
Though the emerging economies represented on the IMF board don’t appear to have been able to get behind a common candidate of their own to succeed the lately resigned Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Fund’s managing director, the five that constitute … Continue reading
Filed under Politics & Society
Port In A Storm
Quite what is going on with Gwadar, the Pakistani blue-water port and natural-gas terminal that China may or may not have been asked to run and develop as a naval base during Pakistan prime minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani’s recent … Continue reading
Filed under Defence
