Another Deadly Blast In A Chinese Coal Mine

Another deadly day in the world’s deadliest mining industry. At least 42 miners are dead and 66 trapped following an underground gas blast at the state-owned Xinxing colliery in Heilongjiang, 250 miles northeast of Harbin near the Russian border. Xinhua said more than 400 miners on shift had escaped and 29 were in hospital injured, [...]

The Slow But Sure Rise Of Western China

Western China’s economy is growing half as fast again as the economy as a whole. Xinhua reports a 12.5% growth in regional GDP in the first nine months of this year, with retail sales up 19%, also outstripping the national average. This Bystander has been wondering for a while whether there isn’t a slow but [...]

Slow Going On Fighting Corruption

China ranks 79th out of 180 on Transparency International’s latest annual rankings of how corrupt countries’ public sectors are perceived to be. Its score of 3.6 is equal to Burkino Faso, Swaziland and Trinidad and Tobago. Top ranked New Zealand scored 9.4; bottom-ranked Somalia scored 1.1.
From the commentary on the rankings:
China has launched a sustained [...]

Heavy Snows Move South

Beijing’s earlier than usual snowfalls may be melting but across north China the heavy snows have left 32 dead, destroyed 7 billion yuan-worth of winter crops and caused 15,000 building to have collapsed, Xinhua reports. The death toll excludes deaths in traffic accidents caused by the severe weather.
The snows are now moving south, with heavy [...]

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Not much to say about U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit, beyond low expectations met. And what was with the matching dark suits, red ties and white shirts at the two presidents’ closing photo op? Some unintentional symbolism of the two countries being a mirror image of each other?

Spinmasters Winners Of Obama’s Shanghai Town Hall Meeting

U.S. President Obama’s town-hall meeting in Shanghai turned out to be much ado about nothing: generous words for his hosts, and no contentious issues like trade or Tibet tackled head on, just generic and diplomatically couched praise for the universal values of freedom of religion, speech and political expression, with the code words used resonating [...]

Anti-Chinese Backlash Spreads To Angola

The high-profile two-day China-Africa cooperation forum at the start of November was held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on the continent’s north-east corner, a spot as pleasant as it is distant from the ugly edge of the China’s growing business and diplomatic push into Africa. As this Bystander has noted before, there are [...]

Testy Tone Over Yuan Bodes Ill For Obama Visit To Beijing

An early sign of of some of the bickering over trade and exchange rates that will be going on behind closed doors during  U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to China: At the APEC meeting in Singapore, the two countries couldn’t agree on the wording of the meeting’s communiqué in the part that referred to currencies. [...]

A Distant Prince Comes Calling, Whatever

In times far gone, China was a suzerain, extracting tribute from less powerful people on its periphery, controlling their foreign affairs but allowing them some domestic autonomy. As Imperial China was the center of the civilized world by its own lights, the periphery was everywhere else. That made for a straightforward worldview, and one not [...]

Central Bank Tightens Policy A Notch, But What Is It Saying About The Yuan?

Pay less notice to the latest monthly industrial production and retail sales figures — both up 16% in October from a year before, with the trade surplus almost doubling from September, to $24 billion, as the contraction in exports eased to its slowest pace this year — and more to the subsequent statement by the [...]