Dave Porter Weblog

An Affirmative Agenda, A Responsible Course

The Council on Foreign Relations, Task Force Report #59, "U.S.-China Relations: An Affirmative Agenda, A Responsible Course" (April, 2007) recommends (page 93 of the report):

Education

One of the more important, but less obvious, steps the United States can take to enhance its ability to influence China is to educate Americans in Chinese studies and to expand America’s educational exchange programs with China. Accordingly, the United States should launch a major new initiative to strengthen the nation’s ability to understand and interact with China on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA). This new NDEA would:

• Fund a comprehensive national educational plan designed to train a new generation of Americans about China’s language, history, economy, politics, and culture. Numerous educational institutions are continuing and expanding these programs, not only at the collegiate level, but also in primary and secondary education, often with cooperation from nongovernmental organizations (like the Asia Society) and corporations. The Task Force recommends that federal funding for these efforts should be significantly increased.

Shanghai: NY on Steriods

The Globalist article "Shanghai's Latest  Global Turn" by Jeff Wasserstrom:

...Now, it is sometimes described as outpacing both the French capital and the Big Apple, and treated as an excitingly or dangerously ultra-modern locale. It now has more skyscrapers than Manhattan, a maglev faster than France’s TGV, and a new media nickname, “New York on Steroids,” that implies a worry about excess....

China's New Green City

The Wired Magazine article "Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis" by Douglas McGray:

...Today Gutierrez and a team of Arup specialists from Europe, North America, and Asia are finalizing a plan for a scratch- built metropolis called Dongtan. Anywhere else in the world, it would have been a thought exercise, done up pretty for a design book or a museum show. But Shanghai's economy is growing three times faster than the US economy did at the height of the dotcom boom. More than 2,000 high-rises have gone up within city limits in the past decade. The city's most famous stretch of skyline, including the jewel-box-like Jin Mao Tower and the purple rocket-shaped Pearl TV Tower, was a rice paddy just 20 years ago. Now some 130 million people live within a two and a half hour drive of downtown. Even the wild ideas get built here.

Dongtan breaks ground later this year on a plot about the size of Manhattan on Chongming Island. The first condos and commercial space will hit the market by 2010, around the time a 12-mile bridge and tunnel combo and subway extension will link the city to Shanghai's new international airport (45 minutes away) and financial district (30 minutes). By 2050, Dongtan will have a half-million residents, more than Miami or Atlanta today....

....It outlines the world's first green city, every block engineered in response to China's environmental crisis. It's like the source code for an urban operating system. "We're not focused on the form," Gutierrez explains. "We're focused on the performance of the form." He and his team imagine a city powered by local, renewable energy, with superefficient buildings clustered in dense, walkable neighborhoods; a recycling scheme that repurposes 90 percent of all waste; a network of high tech organic farms; and a ban on any vehicle that emits CO₂....

China's Asian Offense, US Not Paying Attention?

Newsweek article "Losing Another War.... In Asia" by Fareed Zakaria:

...Talk of China's "soft power" has grown over the last year. But what I saw last week was not evidence of soft power in the sense Harvard professor Joseph Nye meant when he coined the term—the attractiveness of a country and its values. Few people in Asia are actively pining for "the Chinese Dream" because it's not really clear what that is—and to the extent that there is one it sounds suspiciously like the American Dream. Really, it's China's hard power that is on the rise. Beijing has become remarkably adept at using its political and economic muscle in a patient, low-key and highly effective manner.

China's diplomacy emphasizes its core strengths—a long-term perspective, a nonpreachy attitude and strategic decision-making that isn't bogged down by internal opposition or bureaucratic paralysis. Over the last decade, for example, China has greatly improved its historically tense relations with Southeast Asia. It's taken a more accommodating political line, provided generous aid packages (often far outstripping those provided by the United States) and moved speedily on a free-trade deal with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Japan wanted to cut a similar deal but has dithered, racked by power struggles between political and bureaucratic factions in Tokyo. The United States can't even begin such a conversation with ASEAN because we will not talk to Burma. One result: this summer China plans to hold military exercises with some of these countries, most of which have been U.S. allies for decades....

Walmart items from China

Benjamin Edwards has a results table and map from a 2001 survey of seven Walmart stores in New York and Connecticutt as to the country of origin of items on the store shelves. 46% of the items came from China, 19% from the US.

A New World with Chinese Characteristics

Asia Times article "A new world with Chinese characteristics" by David Gosset

...In fact, China's renaissance is, potentially, the source of a more stable Asia, and of a more harmonious global system. Will a re-emerging China and the United States clash in the 21st century? Let us not forget that during World War II Chinese and Americans were allies against Japan. Thirty-five years after the Shanghai Communique, China and the US are de facto interdependent. More and more people both in Washington and in Beijing realize that a genuine cooperative Sino-US relationship could open an unprecedented period of peace and  prosperity around the Pacific....

...The West is assuming that it will continue to be at the avant-garde of the world as the   unique source of material and moral progress. It should realize that if China is already enriching the dynamics of the global village, then, one day, it could also possibly lead by its capacity to innovate and to co-design a modernity in which it would have once again a central position....

Sexy San Ba

This episode on life in China today from the internet TV station Danwei, part of their Sexy Beijing series, is 6 minutes 47 seconds long.

March 8, or 'san ba' in Chinese, is International Women's Day, a holiday that is traditionally celebrated with much official support in China. But 'san ba' is also a rather insulting way to refer to a woman. In this episode of Sexy Beijing, Su Fei finds out why the country that wants women to hold up half the sky uses the date of their own holiday to put them down

China's MG company

NY Times article "The Classical British Sports Car from China" by Craig S. Smith:

MG, the legendary British brand that expired after a lengthy illness, will be revived this month as a Chinese sports car when the Nanjing Automobile Corporation begins to produce convertible sports cars under that name in China...

...The investment agency that China is setting up to diversify its $1.1 trillion foreign exchange holdings could provide another boost, particularly as the government sees the entire world — including developing countries in Africa and Latin America — as its stage for acquisitions.

It began when the Chinese television and mobile telephone maker TCL bought the bankrupt Schneider Electronics of Germany in 2002. The computer maker Lenovo acquired I.B.M.’s troubled personal computer business in 2004.

Now, China Qianjiang Group, the largest motorcycle manufacturer in China, owns Benelli, the oldest motorcycle manufacturer in Italy. Shenyang Machine Tool Group has bought the 140-year-old German machine tool maker Schiess. Xinjiang Chalkis, a tomato producer, even owns a French tomato cannery and sells Chinese tomato sauce in Provence. All of those target companies were facing financial crises.

Many of China’s foreign purchases have been focused on energy resources, dominated by big state-owned enterprises like the national oil giants PetroChina and Cnooc, which have spent billions in recent years acquiring oil and natural gas fields. Those deals have helped swell the value of China’s foreign acquisitions to nearly $14 billion on more than 100 deals last year, from just $18.6 million in 1990, according to Thomson Financial, which tracks global investment trends....

Thomas Barnett comments in his post "What China will do with its money is what all people do with their money: use it to make them rich:"

...China’s government is now encouraging outbound FDI, which only increases the economy’s dense financial connectivity with the outside world, subjecting Beijing to more and more rules. It’s a totally natural progression, threatening only poorly run companies, who, quite frankly, should be devoured by somebody rather than linger and bring our economy down--however tangentially.

China’s playing up.  We can look down in fear, or we can look up ourselves and get on with it.

Fear is always the choice of the lazy.

Jobs aren’t eternal.  Talent is.

 

Chinese Star Architect Ma Yansong

Another episode on life in China today from the internet TV station Danwei, part of their Hard Hat series. It is 8 minutes 15 seconds long. This episode of the Hard Hat Show is about Ma Yansong, a young architect whose Beijing firm Mad recently won an international competion for the design of a landmark residential tower in Mississauga, Canda's seventh largest city. Dubbed the 'Marilyn Monroe Building', it is a spectacular and sensuous skyscraper that was the favorite choice of the judges, the press and the public.

Danwei TV recently caught up with Ma and asked him some questions about the Marilyn Monroe Building, and his views on architecture in China.

To see more of Mad's work, take a look at their www.i-mad.com

This video was shot and edited by Luke Mines, the clip is presented by Jeremy Goldkorn, with music by Fernando Fidanza and Jerry Chan.

Rumblings Over Taiwan

Article "China Fury at Chen's Taiwan Call" on BBC News:

China has hit out at Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian after he made a strongly pro-independence speech on Sunday.

Mr Chen said Taiwan should pursue independence, write a new constitution and change its official name from "Republic of China" to Taiwan.China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said anyone wanting to split Taiwan from the mainland was a "criminal". " The row came as China opened its annual session of parliament and announced a hike in defence spending.

Mr Chen, in a speech to a pro-independence group on Sunday, said: "Taiwan should be independent". "Taiwan is a country whose sovereignty lies outside the People's Republic of China," he added, referring to China by its formal name.He spoke of a "four wants" policy - namely independence, a new constitution, further development and a change to the country's officially designated name.

Since taking office, President Chen has sought to emphasise the island's separate identity, the BBC's Caroline Gluck in Taipei says. But his latest comments are his strongest since taking office and raise new worries of increased tensions with China as well as Taiwan's main ally, the US, our correspondent adds.

Those fears contributed to falls on Taiwan's stock market on Monday and a weakening of the Taiwan dollar against the US dollar. Opposition leaders accused him of being irresponsible and putting Taiwan at risk of a possible war with China.

China sees Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to use force if the island ever moved to declare formal independence.

The United States is committed to supplying Taiwan with defensive weapons, but opposes any Taiwanese provocation of China....