China Romance
General Discussion and Useful Links => The Campfire => Topic started by: Vince G on July 13, 2010, 07:49:30 am
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17 dead, 44 missing as landslides hit China towns
By CHI-CHI ZHANG, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 28 mins ago
BEIJING – Landslides slammed into three mountain hamlets in western China early Tuesday, killing 17 people and leaving 44 missing, while crews drained a fast-rising reservoir in another part of the country following heavy rains.
The landslides swept through three different areas before dawn, state media said. In the worst-hit town of Xiaohe in Yunnan province, four died and rescuers were searching for 42 others, the official provincial newspaper Yunnan Daily reported on its website. Another 38 were injured.
In neighboring Sichuan province, seven died and one person was missing in Yandai village, while rescuers recovered six bodies and were searching for one person in Sima village, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Meanwhile, the waters in a reservoir near the far western city of Golmud began to subside Tuesday after hundreds of workers and soldiers finished digging a diversion channel, an official at the Qinghai province water bureau said.
The reservoir at one point swelled to almost four feet (more than a meter) above its warning level, the Golmud city government website said. Over the weekend, about 10,000 residents were evacuated as soldiers transported sandbags, rocks and dirt and used bulldozers to dig the emergency waterway, the website said.
Still, parts of Golmud, a transport and mining hub on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, were already under six feet (two meters) of water, Xinhua reported.
Usually prone to drought, Qinghai has seen increasingly heavy rainfalls in recent years. This year's rains fell as snow melted in the surrounding mountains. Dozens of reservoirs swelled beyond their warning levels, said the water bureau official.
Heavy rain is expected to sweep through the Yangtze River basin, including Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Sichuan provinces, through Wednesday, the China Meteorological Administration said.
Parts of China experience annual flooding. In the first ten days of July, torrential rains have caused more than 50 deaths and economic losses of 8.9 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion), according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
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they are anticipating heavy rains here all the way until the 22nd of this month. and its already a disaster there
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Ted,
Are you speaking of Beijing or Guangzhou?
Dave C
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no i mean in Shichuan and Yunan provinces were it is already at the point of disaster with all the landslides and flooding
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From today's China Daily:-
Threat of 'worst flood in 12 years'
WUHAN - A massive flooding similar to the one in 1998 that killed thousands of people is likely to occur this year, if downpours continue to batter the upper and middle reaches of the Yangtze River, a flood-control official has warned. "Although the current situation along the Yangtze River has yet to reach the danger level, it is definitely at a crucial point," Wang Jingquan, director of the flood control and drought relief office affiliated to the Yangtze River Water Resources Committee, told China Daily on Wednesday.
Monitoring results from the committee suggested that as of Wednesday, the water level of all sections of the Yangtze River had exceeded the annual average level for mid-July, Wang said. Since June 7, water levels of the Jiujiang section and Boyang Lake along the Yangtze River have gone beyond the alert level twice. The water level at the Three Gorges Dam reached 150 meters, 5 meters higher than the alert level during flood season."We are definitely facing great challenges in flood control along the Yangtze River because heavy rainfalls usually hit the river valley in July and August," Wang said.
The three massive floods in the Yangtze River valley in 1975, 1983 and 1998 all occurred in July and August, he said."There will be no room for optimism as the incoming Typhoon Conson will add to the grave situation in flood control," Wang said."If heavy rain hits the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, coupled with the continuous rainfall in the middle and lower reaches, severe flooding similar to that in 1998 will occur."
In the summer of 1998, China experienced its worst flooding in parts of the Yangtze River basin, which killed 4,150 people and forced 18.4 million to be relocated. Economic losses totaled 255 billion yuan ($37 billion).The State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters also forecast that a recurrence of the massive flooding in 1998 is possible because of similar weather conditions this year.The China Meteorological Administration forecast on Wednesday that the rain belt will move to regions along the Huaihe River from Friday to Monday.
Heavy rains will hit Sichuan province and Chongqing upstream of the Yangtze River this week, while rainstorms will batter Hainan and Guangdong provinces under the influence of Conson after Thursday, it said.Flooding and landslides triggered by heavy rains have crested riverbanks, broken dikes and cut off power and water supplies in parts of the badly hit areas in the south, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless.Flash floods forced more than 30,000 people to evacuate in Jiangxi province on Wednesday morning and caused water levels at three reservoirs in Poyang county to spill over.
The local meteorological bureau issued a top alert for rainstorms on Wednesday.Landslides triggered by heavy rains in Yunnan, Sichuan and Hunan provinces left at least 41 people dead and nearly 40 others missing earlier this week.In Qiaojia county, Yunnan, one of the worst-hit areas, landslides triggered by torrents on Tuesday morning killed 17 people and left 28 missing as of Wednesday, China National Radio reported on Wednesday.
Two landslides killed 14 people in neighboring Sichuan. In Hunan, 10 people including four young children died in two separate landslides this week, Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday.The recent downpours have claimed 118 lives, left 47 missing and displaced more than 1 million people in 11 provinces and regions in the central and southern parts of China, with direct economic losses reaching 360 million yuan from July 1 to July 14, latest statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed.
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have ordered relevant ministries and local governments to ensure the safety of the public and minimize property losses as the country has entered the flood season. Hu and Wen stressed that people residing in areas under the threat of floods and typhoons must be relocated to safety in a timely manner.
Things are not looking good at the moment, lets hope it's not as bad as they think it might be. It's bad enough now!
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Frequent Sightings of UFO's in China
Multiple Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings have recently been reported across different regions in China. They were spotted from June 30 to July 10 in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, the northeastern city of Changchun, the southeastern city of Hangzhou, and the southern city of Xiamen.
People have been perplexed by UFO sightings for many years. Governments tend to be non committal about their existence, one possibility might be that they fear a mass hysteria if announced that they are real. However, independent UFO researchers known as ufologists, are quick to say that “Yes, UFOs do exist.”
Urumqi Xinjiang : UFO Spotted
One recent sighting was in Urumqi, Xinjiang province, in northwestern China. At around 11:00 p.m. on June 30, a round, bright object was seen moving slowly eastward, leaving an enormous, fan-shaped trail of white light behind. A photo taken by a local resident was published in the July 5 issue of Xingjiang Metropolitan Daily.
According to Song Huagang, secretary-general of the Xinjiang Astronomical Society, the object was an intercontinental missile launched by the U.S. on June 30.
The "missile theory" was dismissed on July 9 by Wang Sichao, an astronomy researcher from the Zijinshan Astronomical Observatory (also known as Purple Mountain Observatory, under the aegis of the Chinese academy of Sciences.)
Wang told China News Service that it was not a U.S. missile, because Xinjiang and California are more than 7000 km (3450 miles) apart. On viewing the video footage Wang said that the UFO seems to be "somewhat strange," given its exceptionally bright midsection and its fascinating shape.
Hangzhou: Preferred Hangout
China News Service reported on July 8 that the Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport in the southeast province of Zhejiang was closed for one hour on July 7, at around 9:00 p.m. Due to a UFO sighting, flights were grounded. According to a witness who was in a plane that was landing, the object looked like a bright twinkling dot, coming and going in the blink of an eye.
Wang Sichao, from the Zhijinshan Astronomical Observatory dismissed the phenomenon, saying, “There is not enough information to draw a conclusion at this time.”
At around 7:30 p.m. on July 9, another UFO was spotted in the Binjiang Higher Education Park in Hangzhou. A teacher and several security guards witnessed a star-like, white shining ball of light. “One second it was right here, the next second, it became very, very small: like a faraway star. It flew away at a very high speed,” the teacher (surnamed Li) told Shenzhen Economic Daily.
Changchun’s UFO Video
City Evening News reported that at 3:22 a.m. on July 10, a security guard on the night shift at Huifang Industries in the Changchun Economic & Technological Development Zone, spotted an arm-shaped, spinning object through the video surveillance camera. After about ten minutes, it disappeared. The video replay reveals an object shaped like a curved human arm, appearing from behind some fog. It moved from south to the north before disappearing.
Xiamen’s Beams of Light
Fujian Online (onfj.com) reported that in the early morning hours of July 10, a “sheet of music notes,” composed of vertical light beams, filled up the Xiamen sky in Fujian province.
At first, five beams of light appeared at around 11:30 p.m. on July 9. They quickly grew to around 50 beams. A resident said, “It was very beautiful, like a sheet of music notes.”
When the media arrived at the scene about an hour later, clouds had also moved in, making only a few beams of light visible to the naked eye. However, a picture taken at the time later revealed many more beams of light.
Debate about the existence of extraterrestrial beings and their craft are not new. Wang Sichao, an astronomy researcher from the Zhijinshan Astronomical Observatory told Guangzhou Daily: “I’ve researched about 20 UFOs spotted since 1971. Some of them are swirl-shaped, some fan-shaped, and some are balls of light. They appear at a height of 130 km (426509 ft) to 1,500 km (4921260 ft) above ground. Their speed is much lower than the escape velocity (7 miles/sec on the surface of the Earth.) Some were as slow as 0.18 miles/sec. Yet they can fly parallel to the earth’s surface, at a height of 1,460km (4790026 ft), for as long as 25 minutes. They must have some sort of anti-gravity mechanism. Otherwise, they would have crashed to the earth in no time.”
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Yipeee there back!
Does this mean we should resurrect the old UFO thread Vince? and get rocky to tell us all about the ones he's seen? Oh, ok maybe not.........
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or the ones he has boarded and talked with lol!!!
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Oh I know we are not alone . This is why I keep an close Eye on some of our Member's with strange Names , looking for OUR beautiful chinese Women .
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Anyone notice that Rocky hasn't been around lately? Could it be him flying over China in his new contraption he has been calling a house?
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his little green freinds must have picked him up again
or the building inspector made him tear it down and start over
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Nah , Rocky said he would be off air for a little while , something to do with sparks and net , guess he cannot pedal fast enough or connect in his new abode yet , regards Robert.
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Robert,
Occasionally some of the long timers here will give nicknames to others on the site. I think you just stumbled over Rocky's even though Rocky is a nickname. How about Sparky. :D
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or how about Skippy
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Just a funny little story from a few years ago , I used to import and install glass bricks , on this particular project involving new classrooms and basketball courts etc , the building was way past lockup when the project builders decided to get there own back on the super smart government supervisors who had said all along fixed price, no add ons , just build it to the drawings and spec's ,at the site meeting which I was attending the builders suggested was it not time for the electrical work to be installed , very blank looks and then panic as there were no drawings for any electrical works at all even drawn up , so the builders had a huge smile as they now had a very large extra on a cost plus plus plus basis , regards Robert .
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thats just to funny. now what an expensive add on lol!!!!!
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Yao Ming, others film ads to boost China's image
By CHI-CHI ZHANG, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 21 mins ago
BEIJING – Basketball star Yao Ming, movie director John Woo and piano prodigy Lang Lang are among dozens of celebrities who will appear in television commercials later this year in a bid by China to boost its image abroad.
Experts say Chinese leaders have been unhappy over international coverage of sensitive aspects of the country, such as human rights and Beijing's control of Tibet. The government has accused international media organizations of being biased and focusing on negative news.
China has started making the commercials along with a short film using 50 celebrities, including astronaut Yang Liwei and Olympic gold medalist diver Guo Jingjing, state broadcaster CCTV reported this week.
The stars will promote China's economic, cultural, sports and other achievements in 30-second television commercials, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The State Council, China's Cabinet, said the ads will promote an image of prosperity, democracy, openness, peace and harmony. Filming is to be completed by October and the ads will air on international networks such as CNN, Xinhua said. No dates were given for when they will be broadcast.
The ads reflect Chinese leaders' desire to change negative perceptions of the government, which is often seen as secretive and closed, as the country's presence on the global stage grows, Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Beijing University, said Wednesday.
"China now has the economic means and wants to promote its message abroad," he said. "China's desire to change its image abroad is partially a reflection of the leaders' anxiety as to why there are negative perceptions of China. They want to promote the country as peaceful and full of goodwill."
China is the world's biggest exporter and is poised to overtake Japan as the world's second-largest economy. In recent years it has stepped up a campaign to boost its influence with Confucius Institutes — which teach Chinese language and culture — and overseas news channels.
In July, the country launched a global English-language television channel, CNC World, which is geared toward Western audiences and provides international and Chinese news from a Chinese perspective. It is run by Xinhua, a propaganda arm of the Communist Party.
The Ministry of Education began providing financial incentives to universities in the U.S. and other countries in recent years to open Confucius Institutes, named for a renowned Chinese philosopher. More than 60 colleges in the U.S. now have the institutes.
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has anyone told the local people who sell that they are trying to promote a good image??
lots and lots of work needed there as they chase the almighty rmb. (rip u off)
but as your known as a local that nonsense does stop
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Asia flooding plunges millions into misery
Associated Press Writer
2 hrs 58 mins ago
BEIJING – Floods and landslides across Asia plunged millions into misery Sunday as rubble-strewn waters killed at least 127 in northwestern China and 4 million Pakistanis faced food shortages amid their country's worst-ever flooding.
In Indian-controlled Kashmir, rescuers raced to find 500 people still missing in flash floods that have already killed 132, while North Korea's state media said high waters had destroyed thousands of homes and damaged crops.
Terrified residents fled to high ground or upper stories of apartment buildings in China's Gansu province after a debris-blocked river overflowed during the night, smashing buildings and overturning cars.
The official Xinhua News Agency said Sunday that authorities were seeking to locate an estimated 1,300 people still missing in the latest deluge in a summer that has seen China's worst seasonal flooding in a decade. That figure was down from 2,000 earlier in the day.
Worst hit was the county seat of Zhouqu in the province's Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, where houses buckled and streets were filled with more than a yard (meter) of mud and water.
The landslides struck after heavy rains lashed China late Saturday, causing the Bailong River to burst its banks, Xinhua quoted the head of Zhouqu county, Diemujiangteng, as saying.
The devastation was worsened by flotsam that blocked the river upstream, creating a 2-mile (3-kilometer) -long lake that overflowed and sent waves of mud, rocks and water crashing down on the town, ripping houses from their foundations and tearing six-story apartment buildings in half.
Explosives experts were flying to the scene by helicopter to demolish the blockage and safely release potential flood waters ahead of more rain forecast through Wednesday.
China Central Television said 45,000 people had been evacuated, but the region's remote, mountainous location was hampering the emergency response. Narrow roads prevented the movement of heavy equipment, forcing rescuers to rely on shovels, picks and buckets. Firefighters rescued 28 people on Sunday and the government had allocated 500 million yuan ($73 million) for recovery efforts, Xinhua said.
Around China, the country's worst flooding in a decade has killed more than 1,100 people this year, with more than 600 still missing. The floods have caused tens of billions of dollars in damage across 28 provinces and regions.
In Pakistan, more than 1,500 people have been killed and millions more left begging for help following the worst floods in the country's history. Prices of fruit and vegetable skyrocketed Sunday, with more than 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of crops destroyed and at least 4 million people in need of food assistance in the coming months.
The latest deaths included at least 53 people killed on Saturday when landslides buried two villages in the northern Gilgit-Baltistan, senior government official Ali Mohamamd Sikandar said.
Pakistan has worked with international partners to rescue more than 100,000 people and provide food and shelter to thousands more. But the government has struggled to cope with the scale of a disaster that it estimates has affected 13 million people and could get worse as heavy rains lashed Pakistan again on Sunday.
At least 1.4 million acres (570,000 hectares) of crops were destroyed in the central province of Punjab, the breadbasket for the rest of Pakistan, the United Nations reported. Many more crops were devastated in the northwest, where destruction from the floods has been most severe and many residents are still trying to recover from intense battles between the Taliban and the army last year.
Many flood victims have complained they have not received aid quickly enough or at all. The number of people needing assistance could increase as heavy rains continued to hit many areas of the country. The swollen Indus River overflowed near the city of Sukkur in southern Sindh province on Sunday, submerging the nearby village of Mor Khan Jatoi with chest-high water and destroying many of its 1,500 mud homes.
"We are sitting on the bank with nothing in our hands; no shelter, no food," said a flood victim in Sukkur, Allah Bux. "We are helpless and in pain."
The U.N. special envoy for the disaster, Jean-Maurice Ripert, said billions of dollars would be needed to help Pakistan recover, but funds could be difficult to procure amid the global financial crisis.
In neighboring India, rescuers dug through crushed homes and piles of mud searching for 500 people still missing after flash floods sent massive mudslides down remote desert mountainsides in Indian-administered Kashmir, officials said. The death toll rose to 132 with about 500 others injured.
The dead included at least five foreign tourists whose nationalities were not immediately known.
Thousands of army, police and paramilitary soldiers were also clearing roads to reach isolated villages in the Ladakh region cut off by Friday's powerful thunderstorms, state police Chief Kuldeep Khoda said.
About 2,000 foreign tourists were in the area, a popular destination for adventure sports enthusiasts, when the storm hit, burying homes and toppling power and telecommunication towers.
North Korea's state media said 36,700 acres (14,850 hectares) of farmland were submerged and 5,500 homes destroyed or flooded after recent heavy rains.
However, South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung said the damage did not appear to be serious compared to previous years. Flooding in North Korea in 2007 killed about 600 people, left another 100,000 homeless, and destroyed more than 11 percent of the country's crops.
Floods this year in the neighboring Chinese province of Jilin have left 85 people dead and caused an estimated 45 billion yuan ($6.6 billion) in economic losses.
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BEIJING – A plane that crashed in a northeastern Chinese village this week belonged to the North Korean military and went down because of mechanical failure, the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday. The pilot reportedly died on the spot.
The unusual accident involving what appeared to be a MiG-21 fighter jet spurred speculation that the plane was piloted by a defector from impoverished North Korea. It crashed Tuesday in an apple orchard in Liaoning province about 150 kilometers (90 miles) from the North Korean border.
"The plane ... lost its course because of mechanical failure and strayed into the Chinese territory," the Xinhua report said, citing unspecified Chinese government sources. "Investigations found that the crash was caused by mechanical failure."
The pilot was killed in the accident, Xinhua said. No other details were provided. Villagers in the area said they heard the pilot died on impact.
China and North Korea have "reached consensus" on dealing with the aftermath of the accident, though the Xinhua report did not elaborate except to say that Pyongyang has "expressed regret" for the crash. North Korea's state-controlled media have not reported on the crash.
Villagers said they saw the plane flying low over the area before the crash with the nose up and the tail down, making a strange noise. No one on the ground was harmed.
News photographs of the crash appeared to show a late-model MiG-21bis fighter jet with North Korean markings. It hit a small structure before stopping in a farmer's field.
Limited damage to the wings and rear fuselage appeared to indicate the pilot had attempted a controlled emergency landing.
South Korea's Yonhap News Agency has reported, citing an unidentified intelligence official, that the pilot may have been attempting to defect to Russia. Yonhap has also said South Korean military radar spotted the aircraft taking off from a base in the northeastern border city of Sinuiju.
China takes pains not to openly criticize or embarrass North Korea's government, and might be reluctant to announce a failed North Korean defection even if it involved a military plane straying far into its territory.
Though China is widely considered to be reclusive North Korea's closest ally, ties have been strained in recent years, particularly since the North has resisted an international effort led by Beijing to persuade it to give up its nuclear weapons program.
In recent years, thousands of North Koreans facing hunger and repression at home have made the risky journey into China, with many seeking eventual asylum in South Korea. Many swim across the Yalu river or walk across it in winter.
More than 18,000 North Koreans have arrived in the South since the Korean War, according to South Korea's Unification Ministry. The war ended with a 1953 cease-fire that has never been replaced with a peace treaty.
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Associated Press writer Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.
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BEIJING – Two carriages of a passenger train fell into a river Thursday after floods knocked out a bridge in southwestern China, but all passengers were able to escape safely, state media reported.
The accident happened at 3 p.m. in Guanghan, a city about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, when floods loosened piers on the Shitingjiang bridge, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The train was traveling along when it began shaking and then stopped moving, dining car supervisor Wang Baoning told China Central Television. Two carriages of the train were dangling over the muddy, rushing waters of the river in a "V" shape, he said.
It took more than 10 minutes to evacuate passengers from the cars, which were still connected to adjacent carriages, Wang said.
"Less than two minutes later, one carriage fell into the river. About 10 minutes after that, the other one fell in too," he said. There were no fatalities.
The train cars had washed a short distance downstream and were almost completely submerged, trapped against the base of another bridge, CCTV footage showed.
The train was traveling from Xi'an in northwestern Shaanxi province to Kunming in southwestern Yunnan province.
China has been hit hard by floods and landslides in recent months that have left hundreds dead and washed away settlements in some parts of the country. The storms have caused tens of billions of dollars in damage.
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BEIJING – All nine fireworks factories in Heilongjiang province in northeast China were ordered shut Thursday, days after a blast at one of them killed 20 people.
The factories have been told to dismantle their production facilities by the end of the month, according to a statement on the website of the Heilongjiang Work Safety Administration.
"We have rescinded their permits for production," the statement said.
The official Xinhua News Agency said three government officials and two factory executives were fired or detained after Monday's blast. It said a preliminary investigation showed the plant was illegally producing fireworks.
Up to 50 people were working at the fireworks factory in the city of Yichun when it was rocked by an explosion, damaging nearby buildings and sparking secondary blasts.
A total of 153 people were injured by the blast, which could be felt up to 2 miles (5 kilometers) away and smashed windows in the local government offices and other buildings, the Xinhua reported.
Safety is lax at Chinese fireworks plants, and accidents are common. Dozens of people also die each year from unsafe handling of fireworks while celebrating weddings and traditional holidays.
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BEIJING – Attackers who set off explosives in a restive region of far-western China that killed seven people and wounded 14 others were targeting security forces, the local government said Friday.
The attack a day earlier in Aksu city was the deadliest violence reported in Xinjiang — long beset by ethnic conflict and separatist violence — since rioting in the regional capital of Urumqi last year left about 200 dead, according to an official count.
The attackers threw explosives while driving a three-wheeled motor vehicle into a group of 15 police support officers who were getting into formation while on patrol, a report on the Aksu city website said, citing police spokesman Xiao Chunfeng.
It was not clear whether the police were uniformed or in civilian dress wearing red armbands, as is common in China for government officials in support roles.
Authorities have not said how many of the dead and injured were civilians.
The Aksu report did not say how many people were involved in the attack. Xinjiang government spokeswoman Hou Hanmin earlier said a man belonging to the region's native Uighur ethnic group was captured immediately, while the official Xinhua News Agency said a woman was also involved and died in the blast.
Local officials could not be reached for further comment. Hou's cell phone rang unanswered Friday and a man in the Aksu Communist Party propaganda office referred questions to the city government website and hung up.
Local residents reached by phone Friday said the security situation in Aksu, about 400 miles (650 kilometers) from Urumqi, was normal. They said authorities had not set up checkpoints or imposed a curfew, which has happened in the past after similar violence.
A Germany-based Uighur exile group said Thursday the victims included members of the local police force and its auxiliary unit.
Anti-government sentiment among Uighurs is fed by the Communist Party's heavy-handed control over their language, culture and Islamic faith, along with resentment of Chinese migrants who they believe are favored economically to the detriment of Xinjiang's native population.
The government claims attacks are often planned by exile Uighurs in other countries, including across the border in Central Asia or Pakistan.
In the July 2009 Urumqi riots, long-simmering tensions between the Turkic Muslim Uighurs and China's majority Han flared into open violence. Hundreds of people have been arrested and about two dozen sentenced to death, while many other Uighurs remain unaccounted for and are believed to be in custody.
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Associated Press researcher Xi Yue contributed to this report.
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BEIJING – Rescue crews searched Friday for scores of people left missing and feared dead in southwestern China after torrential rains triggered massive mudslides during a summer plagued by deadly rains and flooding.
Rainfall hampered efforts to find 80 people missing in Puladi township, a remote mountain community in Yunnan province. Hillsides loosened by rain crashed down on the riverside township early Wednesday, covering all but the tallest buildings with a layer of mud and rock several feet (meters) thick. Twelve people were killed, the official Xinhua New Agency said Friday.
It was just the latest landslide to strike China. The worst carnage came Aug. 8 in the town of Zhouqu in the northwestern province of Gansu, where 1,407 people were killed and 358 are still missing. More than 40 people were also killed by floods in two nearby cities.
In southern Sichuan province, floods and mudslides knocked down thousands of homes and cut off roads and power in hard-hit communities including Qingping, Yingxiu and Longchi townships, Xinhua reported. At least 16 people have died and 66 were missing following downpours in the past week.
A disaster was averted in Sichuan on Thursday when authorities rescued all passengers from two train cars that dangled from a flood-damaged bridge over a muddy, rushing river for several minutes before falling into the water.
The two cars dropped into the river just minutes after the last passenger was moved to safety, dining car supervisor Wang Baoning told China Central Television.
Floods and landslides across China in recent months have left hundreds dead and washed away settlements in some parts of the country. The storms have caused tens of billions of dollars in damage.
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China's cautionary tale
By GWYNNE DYER
Will the 21st century belong to China? For a while, perhaps — but only in the sense that it was said to belong to Japan in the 1980s. Looking back now, that seems ridiculous, but at the time best-selling books were predicting that Americans, not to mention the rest of the planet, would be reduced to virtual serfdom by the relentless high-speed growth of the Japanese economy. Then it stopped growing.
Official data published on Aug. 16 revealed that China's economy has overtaken Japan's this year, making it the second-biggest economy in the world. This followed last month's announcement by the International Energy Agency that China is now the world's biggest consumer of energy (and burns about half of the world's total coal production).
Earlier this year China overtook Germany to become the world's No. 1 exporter, and it now makes more cars than any other country in the world. Indeed, it makes as many as Japan and the United States together.
It has more kilometers of high-speed rail, more mobile phone users, and more wind power than anywhere else. As long ago as 2007 it became the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The milestones are zipping past so fast that it's surprising that the Chinese are not suffering from a collective case of whiplash.
If the average growth rates of the U.S. and Chinese economies over the past quarter century continue for another 10 years (around 10 percent for China, and about 3 percent for the U.S.), then China's economy will be three times bigger than it is today, and bigger than that of the U.S. That's the magic of compound interest. Better start learning Chinese, then.
But hang on. China is already the world's second-biggest importer of energy (mostly oil and coal), and its biggest importer of minerals and other industrial raw materials. None of those resources is growing at 10 percent a year, or even 5 percent. If China's imports of those goods grow at 10 percent a year, then the share of other countries must shrink.
China still has an export-led economy, and these other countries are its customers. If commodity prices soar because of ever-expanding Chinese demand for raw materials, then how will those other countries earn the money to pay for Chinese manufactured goods? So the Chinese rate of growth must eventually slow down — but when?
The straight-line projection of current trends would make the Chinese economy bigger than that of the U.S. by 2020. You can still find economic forecasts which predict precisely that, but it is striking that most of the economic consultancies that make such forecasts now suggest that China will not overtake the U.S. until some time between 2027 and 2030.
That implicitly assumes that China will shift to a much lower annual rate of growth in the near future: from 10 percent to only 5 or 6 percent. However, no organization that is making a lot of money from the current orgy wants to spoil the party by spelling out exactly what might cause that sharp decline — so let us do it here.
Back in 1988, the last year of Japan's 30-year boom, the land in the garden of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo was allegedly worth more than the entire state of California, but that was just another way of saying "unsustainable property bubble." The bubble duly burst, bringing down the entire Japanese economy with it — and it has stayed down for the past 22 years, achieving at best 2 percent annual growth and usually much less.
The property bubble in China is reaching similar dimensions, with prices rising annually by 50 percent or more in dozens of cities. When property bubbles finally burst — and they always do — they tend to do a great deal of damage. (Nobody say "subprime.")
There is huge over-investment in China, often in state-sponsored infrastructure and housing projects motivated by considerations of "prestige" or by the opportunities they offer for cronies to make large sums of money. (That is what caused the slump in the smaller Asian "tigers" like Thailand and South Korea in 1998.)
China's wage costs are going up fast, and lower-cost Asian producers like Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh are taking away the labor-intensive goods like clothes and toys that once drove Chinese export growth. Meanwhile, at the upper end of the market, there is little of the genuine technological innovation that the Japanese economy was delivering toward the end of its boom.
The Chinese population is aging almost as fast as Japan's, and China is as resistant as Japan to reinforcing the dwindling workforce by allowing large-scale immigration. If the same inputs tend to produce the same outputs, then the Chinese economy is in big trouble.
That doesn't necessarily mean that China also faces two decades of less than 2 percent growth. It does probably mean that it faces a very nasty slump in the next few years, followed by the transition to a permanently lower rate of growth. Not such a terrible outcome, really: It's still an amazing success story. But it may threaten the regime's survival, since its popularity (if that's the right word) depends almost entirely on its record in delivering the economic goods.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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Ted,
Good job on the news articles. we will have to start calling you Ted the anchorman. Now where have I heard that before....... ::)
Dave C
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the ambassador just wants to keep everyone posted on some of the news here
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good ,bad or indifferent just want to post not what i neccessarily believe in just the articles
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Sat Aug 21, 7:44 am ET
BEIJING – Swelled by torrential rains, the Yalu river that marks the Chinese-North Korean border breached its banks on both sides Saturday, inundating communities and forcing the evacuation of more than 50,000 people in China.
Flood waters punctured a dike between the river and an economic development zone in a low-lying part of the Chinese port city of Dandong, Chinese state media reported. The rain and flooding cut rail service out of the city, destroyed more than 200 houses and left at least three people missing, in addition to the 51,000 evacuated to higher ground, local officials said.
North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency said that about a foot (30 centimeters) of rain had fallen since midnight and the Yalu — or Amnok as its known in Korean — swamped houses, public buildings and farmland in more than five villages near Sinuiju, the city opposite Dandong.
The brief report described Sinuiju and the surrounding area as having been "severely affected" by the flooding and said officials, the military and ordinary civilians were involved in rescue work.
Much of North Korea's trade with the world passes through Sinuiju, forming a vital lifeline for the isolated, economically struggling country. Flooding in previous years has destroyed crops and pushed North Korea deeper into poverty, increasing its dependence on international food aid.
For China, the Dandong flooding is the latest disaster in the country's worst flood season in over a decade. Landslides caused by heavy rains have smothered communities in western China and accounted for most of the more than 2,500 people killed.
Emergency crews recovered more bodies Saturday from the landslide that crushed the southwestern town of Puladi, nearly doubling the death toll from Wednesday's disaster to 23 with 69 others still missing, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
The government's Central Weather Bureau issued an advisory Saturday warning that heavy rains would strike much of the country through the weekend.
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BEIJING – Police in central China have detained an AIDS activist who contracted the virus as a boy and whose tireless campaigning for the rights of those with the disease angered local authorities, his fellow activists said Saturday.
Under pressure to end Tian Xi's campaigning, police from his home town of Gulu detained the 23-year-old on Tuesday and first held him at a county hospital before his family lost track of his whereabouts on Friday, the activists said.
Tian traveled frequently between Gulu and Beijing, petitioning officials in the capital to compensate him and others who contracted AIDS through tainted blood supplies. In recent weeks, Tian had obtained official documents in which leaders from Gulu and Xincai county, where the town is located, ordered police to stop his activism, according to the Chinese advocacy group Aizhixing and Sara L.M. Davis, a New York-based activist.
"It seems absolutely clear that this was related to his petitioning," said Davis, who traded e-mails with Tian 10 days ago when he was in Beijing. She has worked with Tian, bringing him to an AIDS conference last year, and described him as "a very impassioned advocate."
Duty officers with Gulu police and the township government reached by telephone Saturday declined to comment.
After ignoring or demonizing people with AIDS for much of the '80s and '90s, the authoritarian government has taken a more compassionate line on the disease and combating its spread in recent years. But people with AIDS still face difficulties in getting treatment and compensation, and authorities from Beijing to the local level remain deeply suspicious of independent activists.
Tian's case is emblematic of China's troubles in dealing with AIDS. Unregulated schemes to buy blood and sell it to hospitals ended up contaminating blood supplies in central Henan province in the mid-1990s.
Tian was a third grader when rough play during primary school left him with a mild concussion and doctors in Xincai county gave him a blood transfusion, according to his blog. A blood test given to him when he got sick in 2004 confirmed he had HIV, and soon afterward he began campaigning for redress.
"Thousands of people have been infected with HIV through blood sales and blood transfusions, and Tian Xi's case is an emblem of this ongoing disaster," said Davis, whose group, Asia Catalyst, offers training and consulting to grass-roots activists.
Among the organizations Tian worked with was Aizhixing, one of the earliest and most effective groups fighting to end discrimination against people with AIDS. Aizhixing's founder, Wan Yanhai, came under harsher police scrutiny and harassment early this year and decided to leave China.
One official document Tian had gotten hold of singled out his relationship to Aizhixing and to Wan, the group said. In another document that Tian described to Davis in a conversation 10 days ago, Xincai county leaders ordered local security officers "take measures to perform ideological education work" on Tian.
Petitioners of varied causes flood Beijing to campaign for redress of local wrongs. Tired of the onslaught, the Chinese government has pressured local governments to stop the flow of petitioners, warning that official promotions depend on compliance.
While petitioning in Beijing in mid-July, Tian was detained and briefly held in a local government office being used as a makeshift detention center — a "black jail" — Aizhixing said.
Another petitioner from Gulu said Tian called him on Thursday around noon and said that he was being held at Xincai's No. 2 People's Hospital, watched by more than 10 police. The petitioner, who would only give his surname, Mei, said that Tian's mother went to the hospital on Friday but neither her son nor the police were there.
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BEIJING (Reuters) – China has to pursue political reform to safeguard its economic health, Premier Wen Jiabao said during a visit to the booming town of Shenzhen, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Wen's call for political reform lacked specifics. But his comments reflect broader worries that unless the Party embraces at least limited reforms to make officials more answerable, then corruption and abuses may erode the country's economic prospects.
"Without the safeguarding of political restructuring, China may lose what it has already achieved through economic restructuring and the targets of its modernization drive might not be reached," Wen was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
"People's democratic rights and legitimate rights must be guaranteed. People should be mobilized and organized to deal with, in accordance with the law, state, economic, social and cultural affairs," Wen added.
Wen also wants to "create conditions" to allow the people to criticize and supervise the government as a way to address "the problem of over-concentration of power with ineffective supervision."
Wen has developed a reputation as the member of China's ruling Communist Party leadership most sympathetic to relaxing some of the country's top-down controls.
Wen will retire as premier in early 2013. He has used recent speeches and comments to indicate that he wants to spend his final years in office focused on improving social welfare, promoting more balanced and equitable economic growth, and addressing public discontent with government.
In Shenzhen, a small village that exploded into a city of 14 million people in the last three decade, Wen said the Shenzhen story showed that reforming and opening up to the outside world "is the only road to achieving national prosperity and the people's happiness."
"Regression and stagnation will not only end the achievements of the three-decade old reform and opening-up drive and the rare opportunity of development, but also suffocate the vitality of China's socialist cause with her own characteristics," the premier added.
(Reporting by Chris Buckley, editing by Miral Fahmy)
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a freind in the USA sent me this article
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Louisa Lim
Foreign Correspondent, Beijing
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129386304 (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129386304)
As China's economy overtakes Japan to become the world's second biggest, it's mostly written about in superlatives: the world's biggest consumer of energy, the biggest car market, even the biggest producer of beer.
But in fact, China's economy is in slowdown: Economic growth has dropped from almost 12 percent in the first quarter to 10.3 percent in the second and is slowing further still.
The dog days of summer are especially sluggish at a real estate agency in Tiantongyuan, a massive suburb of Beijing, once famous for its low-cost housing. But today, there are no takers. Real estate transactions dropped 70 percent after the government moved to slow the market in April. Prices have dropped by about a quarter in this part of town. Still, nobody is buying amid warnings the slump could be just beginning.
Ghost Cities
In real estate agent Meng Jianguo's company, which has 30 employees, the mood is quiet desperation. "From the end of April till now, this whole shop has only sold two flats," Meng said. "You see we're definitely losing money. Lots of other shops have closed down in this street."
Out on the street, it's not just vacant shops people are worrying about. China's electricity company recently estimated there were enough vacant apartments to house 200 million people. The government has denied these figures, but the phenomenon of ghost apartments — and even ghost cities — does exist because of real estate speculation.
The crackdown on that led to a slowdown in construction, and, says Wang Tao from UBS, that has had a knock-on effect on China's trade partners.
"When China slows, then its imports from other countries — and to a lesser extent, the U.S. — will slow, too," he said. "The slowdown of China's growth, the biggest impact of that, is going to be on commodity exporters: the Australias and Brazils and so on."
Woes In The Automotive Sector
China's massive stimulus package two years ago was accompanied by a record lending spree of $1.4 trillion. Now, stimulus incentives are being wound back, and once-favored sectors are coming back to earth with a bump.
In one dealership selling Chinese-made Chery cars, the four employees are playing cards. That's how slow it is. Growth in the auto market is slowing sharply. Shop manager Luo Cixi says sales have halved since last year.
"This year, profits are down a long way, since there are fewer customers," Luo says. "Last year, cars with small engines sold very well after the sales tax was halved. But after the tax was reimposed this year, it's been bad."
Chinese Consumers Not Spending Enough?
All of this suggests Chinese consumers aren't really stepping up to the plate. Domestic consumption is at 35 percent of gross domestic product, the lowest of any major economy. But minimum wages have gone up across China, mostly by more than 20 percent. That will raise prices for manufacturers.
Economists are not necessarily concerned, however.
"Most economists when they look at the slowdown that's taken place over the last couple of months, they're actually more relieved than concerned," says Patrick Chovanec from Tsinghua University.
Chovanec says China must now learn lessons from Japan's experience.
"Japan hit this point in the 1980s, when it became the second-largest economy in the world and the largest exporter in the world. And because it didn't adapt to the fact that it had outgrown its export-driven growth model, it lost its way," he says. "If China wants to continue to grow, it will have to transition from being an export-driven economy to an economy that drives itself."
That would be in China's long-term interests, but it would cause short-term pain. The same is true if Beijing frees up its currency, which it's accused of keeping artificially cheap. China has made symbolic moves to allow it to trade more freely, but it has been reluctant to let it rise too far for fear of a global double-dip recession. It's not yet clear whether China's policymakers have the stomach for that much short-term pain.
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BEIJING – A Chinese passenger jet broke apart as it approached a fog-shrouded runway in the country's northeast and burst into flames as it hit the ground Tuesday, killing 43 people and injuring 53 others, state media said.
The Henan Airlines plane with 91 passengers and five crew crashed in a grassy area near the Lindu airport on the outskirts of Yichun, a city of about 1 million people in Heilongjiang province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Xinhua quoted Hua Jingwei, an Yichun publicity official, as saying that some passengers were thrown from the cabin before the broken plane hit the ground.
The Brazilian-made Embraer E-190 jet had taken off from Heilongjiang's capital of Harbin shortly before 9 p.m. (1300 GMT) and crashed a little more than an hour later, Xinhua said.
A middle-aged man who survived the crash told China Central Television there was bad turbulence as the plane descended, then several big jolts that caused the luggage to come crashing down from the overhead bins.
"After we stopped, the people in the back were panicking and rushed to the front," the unidentified man, who had no visible injuries, said in an interview from a hospital bed. "We were trying to open the (emergency exits) but they wouldn't open. Then the smoke came in ... within two or three minutes or even a minute, we couldn't breathe. I knew something bad was going to happen."
It was not clear from his account at what point the plane broke apart. The man said he and a few others escaped from a hole in the wall of the cabin near the first row of seats, then ran from the burning wreckage.
Click image to see photos of the wreckage
Reuters/Xinhua/Li Guangfu
CCTV showed firefighters dousing the burning plane with hoses and later digging through the wreckage of the jet.
Xinhua said 43 bodies were recovered within hours of the disaster and 53 people were hospitalized, most with broken bones. Wang Xuemei, vice mayor of Yichun, told CCTV that three survivors were in critical condition but gave no details.
CCTV earlier said that 91 people were on board, and gave a lower death and injured toll, but the report appears to not have included the five crew on the plane.
Henan Airlines is based in the central Chinese province of the same name and flies smaller regional jets, mainly on routes in north and northeast China. Previously known as Kunpeng Airlines, the carrier was relaunched as Henan Airlines earlier this year.
Henan Airlines and many other regional Chinese airlines flying shorter routes have struggled in the past few years, losing passengers to high-speed railroad lines that China has aggressively expanded.
An American company, Phoenix-based Mesa Air Group Inc., was an original investor in Henan's predecessor company, Kunpeng, but divested its stake last year. Mesa operates regional services in the U.S. for Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and other carriers and is undergoing bankruptcy reorganization.
Full-tilt expansion of Chinese air traffic in the 1990s led to a series of crashes that gave China the reputation of being unsafe. The poor record prompted the government to improve safety drastically, from airlines to new air traffic management systems at airports.
The last major passenger jet crash in China was in November 2004, when an China Eastern airplane plunged into a lake in northern China shortly, killing all 53 on board and two on the ground.
An MD-11 cargo plane operated by Zimbabwe-based Avient Aviation crashed during takeoff from Shanghai's main airport last November. Three American crew members died while four others on board were injured.
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pics from the crash
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Ted I prefer to see the news on CCTV9 at least Ling has tits. Come to think of it she is not alone there!!!!! Keep on reporting.
Willy