Merged threads-China news

[ttwjr32]

thats just to funny. now what an expensive add on  lol!!!!!

[Vince G]

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.

[ttwjr32]

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

[Vince G]

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.

[ttwjr32]

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.

___

Associated Press writer Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.

[ttwjr32]

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.

[ttwjr32]

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.

[ttwjr32]

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.

__

Associated Press researcher Xi Yue contributed to this report.

[ttwjr32]

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.


Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook

[ttwjr32]

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.

[Bee964]

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

[ttwjr32]

the ambassador just wants to keep everyone posted on some of the news here

[ttwjr32]

good ,bad or indifferent just want to post not what i neccessarily believe in just the articles

[ttwjr32]

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.


Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook Related Searches

[ttwjr32]

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.


Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook Related Searches