Trouble in Tiananmen

Tiananmen Square's iconic portrait of Mao Zedong has been damaged by an arson attack. Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that police had detained Gu Haiou, a 35-year-old man, after he threw a burning object at the six-metre-high portrait on May 12th. Whatever the object was, it left slight burn marks on the picture, which was replaced the next day (there is a supply of spares). Mr Gu, who hails from China's far-western Xinjiang region, had previously been treated for mental illness. His punishment could be severe: a journalist who threw paint-filled eggs at the portrait in 1989 spent almost 17 years in prison.

For you snapshot lunatics...

China Photo Contest

"Send your best shot of people, places or events in China to: dreamblogue@gmail.com with the information required below. We will post several shots, once a week, on OMBW and on http://blogofdreams.com where you and your friends can vote for your favorites. The top 250 will make it into the book. There is NO entry fee.

There will be prizes, yet to be decided, for the winners, links back to blogs or sites if requested, contributor copies of the coffee table book. All rights are returned to the creator upon publication and you are free to multiple submit your work to other sites, magazines or contests. First prize in each division will be an expense paid week on the road with Yanzhi and Dawei and the Dreanblogue Team during their charity and friendship tour of China."

China's Boomtowns

Excerpt from a 8 page long feature by National Geographic, long but worthy, have a read of it.
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a sea of commodities
The Wenzhou airport bookstore stocks a volume titled, Actually, You Don't Understand the Wenzhou People. It shares a shelf with The Feared Wenzhou People, The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, and The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Businessmen. For the Chinese, this part of Zhejiang Province has become a source of fascination, and the local press contributes to the legend. Recently, Wenzhou's Fortune Weekly conducted a survey of local millionaires. One question was: If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be? Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn't make up their minds.

From the beginning, an element of desperation helped create the Wenzhou business tradition. The region has little arable soil, and the mountainous landscape made for bad roads to the interior. With few options, Wenzhou natives turned to the sea, developing a strong trading culture by the end of the Ming dynasty, in the 17th century. But they lost their edge after 1949, when the communists came to power and cut off overseas trade links, as well as most private entrepreneurship. Even in the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's free-market reforms began to take hold, Wenzhou started with distinct disadvantages. Residents lacked the education of people in Beijing, and they didn't attract the foreign investment of Shanghai. When the government established the first Special Economic Zone, whose trade and tax privileges were designed to spur growth, they chose Shenzhen, which is near Hong Kong.

But Wenzhou had the priceless capital of native instinct. Families opened tiny workshops, often with fewer than a dozen workers, and they produced simple goods. Over time, workshops blossomed into full-scale factories, and Wenzhou came to dominate certain low-tech industries. Today, one-quarter of all shoes bought in China come from Wenzhou. The city makes 70 percent of the world's cigarette lighters. Over 90 percent of Wenzhou's economy is private.

The Wenzhou Model, as it became known, spread throughout southern Zhejiang Province. Although nearly 80 percent of all Zhejiang entrepreneurs have a formal education of only eight years or less, the province has become the richest in China by most measures. The per capita incomes for both rural and urban residents are the highest of any Chinese province (this excludes specially administered cities such as Shanghai and Beijing). Zhejiang reflects China's economic miracle: a poor, overwhelmingly rural nation that has somehow become the world's most vibrant factory center.

Over the course of a year, I traveled repeatedly to Zhejiang, every time renting a car in Wenzhou and driving into the province. In the same way that a pilgrim treks across Spain, stopping at the shrines of obscure saints, I passed the birthplaces of products that are usually taken for granted. From the airport, driving south along the coast, I started with hinges—a stretch of road where the vast majority of billboards advertised every possible variation of the piece of metal used to swing a door. A mile later, the ads shifted to electric plugs and adapters. Then I reached a neighborhood of electric switches, followed by fluorescent lightbulbs, then faucets.

Deeper in the province, the shrines became more elaborate. At Qiaotou, I stopped to admire the 20-foot-high (six meters) silver statue of a button with wings that had been erected by the town elders. Qiaotou's population is only 64,000, but 380 local factories produce more than 70 percent of the buttons for clothes made in China. In Wuyi, I asked some bystanders what the local product was. A man reached into his pocket and pulled out three playing cards—queens, all of them. The city manufactures more than one billion decks a year. Datang township makes one-third of the world's socks. Songxia produces 350 million umbrellas every year. Table tennis paddles come from Shangguan; Fenshui turns out pens; Xiaxie does jungle gyms. Forty percent of the world's neckties are made in Shengzhou.

Everything is sold in a town called Yiwu. For the Zhejiang pilgrim, that's the promised land—Yiwu's slogan is "a sea of commodities, a paradise for shoppers." Yiwu is in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles (160 kilometers) from the coast, but traders come from all over the world to buy goods in bulk. There's a scarf district, a plastic bag market, an avenue where every shop sells elastic. If you're burned out on buttons, take a stroll down Binwang Zipper Professional Street. The China Yiwu International Trade City, a local mall, has more than 30,000 stalls—if you spend one minute at each shop, eight hours a day, you'll leave two months later. Yiwu attracts so many Middle Eastern traders that one neighborhood has become home to 23 large Arabic restaurants, as well as a Lebanese bakery. I ate dinner at Arbeer, a Kurdish joint, with a trader from northern Iraq. He was buying blue jeans and electric lamps.
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This article vividly brought me back to the old times growing up among those small family factories and shops in Wenzhou. Picture my family 20 years ago: one aunt of mine ran a leather shop, one uncle ran a shoe factory, my grandfather leased out the ground floor of his house in downtown to have the front room sell shoes and the back room design the shoes and produce shoe molds. So basically if we got together we would never need to buy shoes from outside of the chain - self-sufficient!

August 2007 - new police helicopters in Beijing in use

Unveiled at the 2nd China (Beijing) International Exhibition and Symposium on Police Equipment Anti-Terrorism Technology going on these three days starting from yesterday.



Gallery here.

Trams strike back in Beijing

The famous good ol' Qianmen Street launched its restoration project yesterday, aiming to resume its original late Qing early Republic street architectural style. Trams which disappeared in Beijing 51 years ago are going to show up in the neighborhood again.

Can't wait to see it next time I'm back!

America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat

I re-read Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America a few years ago and was again amazed at how accurately it portrays the United States today, even though it was written in the early 1830s.

The "this" that our reader sent me is a look at America from the perspective of Wu Ting Fang, a Chinese diplomat stationed in the United States in the early 1900s. The "look" is fascinating both for what it says about the United States and for what it says about China.

The article is entitled, Wu Ting-Fang in America and there is also a podcast version as well. The article is by John Leonard, the M.D. Anderson Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston.

By 1914, Wu Ting-fang had been a Chinese diplomat in the United States for eight years when, "prodded by an American woman," he wrote a book on America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat. Dr. Leonard describes it as making "a disorienting, but useful, look at ourselves, even today," and I agree.

Interesting reading of more details via China Law Blog here.

Good news in a city where public parks aren't free

Twenty-six Beijing museums will open free to the public on International Museum Day on May 18. (CRI English)

Forbidden City sees 114,800 tourists Wednesday

114,800 tourists visited Forbidden yesterday, the second day of the May Holiday Golden Week in China.

114,800 is 2.3 times Forbidden City's tourist hosting capacity, and second highest record in history since the implementation of the Golden Week.

Why couldn't they limit the visitor's volume? How long can this palace stand being constantly overloaded like this?