Opening Today of The Peninsula Shanghai

Our Proud Return -- The Past Meets the Future -- The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited Returns to Shanghai with the Opening Today of The Peninsula Shanghai

Encompassing the Best of Our Traditions and the Height of Sophistication in One Extraordinary Hotel

SHANGHAI, Oct. 18 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- A spectacular and iconic new building now graces Shanghai's celebrated Bund -- The Peninsula Shanghai opens today.

(Photo: http://www.prnasia.com/sa/2009/10/17/20091017766702.html)

(Photo: http://www.prnasia.com/sa/2009/10/17/2009101735020.html)

Built in the style of a noble residence of the 1920s and 30s, The Peninsula Shanghai harks back to Shanghai's heyday, when the city was "the Paris of the East". A blend of Art Deco features with subtle Chinese influences has been faithfully recreated in the 235 superbly appointed guestrooms and suites -- among the largest in the city -- in this perfect marriage of history and contemporary comfort.

Grand and glamorous, yet with a welcoming residential feel, this unique property marks the return of classic luxury to Shanghai. The first new building on the Bund in over 60 years and occupying a prime site on the Huangpu River beside the former British Consulate Gardens and the Suzhou Creek, The Peninsula Shanghai offers spectacular views of the Pudong skyline, river and historic Bund.

This glorious new landmark property is the Group's ninth prestigious hotel, and also marks the return of parent company, The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited, to its Shanghai roots after an absence of 60 years, where it operated four of the city's premier hotels -- The Kalee, Majestic, Palace and Astor House -- in the first half of the last century.

Never before has Shanghai seen elegance, service and style on this scale, in a hotel that offers historical authenticity blended with The Peninsula Hotels' proprietary state-of-the-art in-room technology.

Four themed suites -- The Astor, Majestic, Palace and Peninsula Suites are the epitome of gracious living, with outdoor rooftop terraces and breathtaking views of the Bund and Pudong's futuristic skyline. Together with the spectacular Rose Ballroom, which accommodates 450 guests for a banquet or 1,000 for a cocktail reception, these will be Shanghai's most exclusive venues for weddings, prestigious events, celebrations and product launches.

Special Peninsula features include an elevator large enough to deliver a limousine to the ballroom, a custom-made 1930s Schindler cage lift and a full- scale replica of a 1930s seaplane in the Rosemonde Aviation Lounge, The Peninsula Arcade with a selection of the world's top luxury brands, customised Rolls-Royce Phantoms, not to mention unique wedding photo opportunities, from the splendid marble staircase, to the 900 sq m Palace Suite wraparound rooftop terrace with its breathtaking views of the entire city, tipped to quickly become Shanghai's number one venue for prestigious corporate events and social occasions.

When it comes to dining at The Peninsula Shanghai, China's first Michelin Star winner, Chef Chi Keung Tang already has a loyal following for his famous signature Cantonese dishes. Enjoy his MSG-free classic cuisine and dim sum favourites at The Yi Long Court restaurant, which together with the speciality tea counter, Chef's Table and seven private dining salons, revives the lofty elegance of a rich 1930s merchant's residence.

Traditional Afternoon Tea will be served in the triple-height Lobby lounge overlooking the former British Consulate Gardens, with tea dances held once a month. As the rollout continues, guests can look forward to the unveiling of the rooftop Sir Elly's Restaurant Bar and Terrace, the hotel's international dining venue offering modern European cuisine with French influences. Spectacular skyline views can be enjoyed both from Sir Elly's dining room and the top floor private dining rooms. The basement will see the decadent days of Shanghai's heyday come to life in the Salon de Ning late night lounge, while The Compass Bar, with its dramatic deep purple and French navy decor, maritime memorabilia and outdoor terrace is the hotel's cosy and inviting bar, the perfect meeting place just off the Bund.

No Peninsula would be complete without a Peninsula Spa by ESPA, and the partnership with the renowned operator continues, with exciting new decor and special spa treatments unique to The Peninsula Shanghai. Nine treatment rooms, with a cool navy and white nautical theme, complement the sauna, steam and relaxation rooms, just steps from the 25-metre indoor swimming pool and expansive Fitness Centre.

"Opening The Peninsula Shanghai is a unique opportunity to re-establish our historic links to this wonderful city. We've tried to create an approach that s different, and we feel very comfortable and proud to be back", says Mr Paul Tchen, The Peninsula Shanghai's General Manager. "Shanghai's a natural part of our storyline, a romantic and historic continuation of the golden age of travel and our company's rich heritage".

Incorporated in 1866 and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (00045), HSH is a holding company whose subsidiaries and its jointly controlled entity are engaged in the ownership and management of prestigious hotel, commercial and residential properties in key destinations in Asia and the USA. The hotel portfolio of the Group comprises The Peninsula Hong Kong, The Peninsula Shanghai, The Peninsula Tokyo, The Peninsula Beijing, The Peninsula New York, The Peninsula Chicago, The Peninsula Beverly Hills, The Peninsula Bangkok, The Peninsula Manila and The Peninsula Paris (opening in 2012). The property portfolio of the Group includes The Repulse Bay Complex, The Peak Tower and The Peak Tramways, St. John's Building, The Landmark in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and the Thai Country Club in Bangkok, Thailand.

For further information, please contact:

Ms Cecilia Lui
Regional Director of Communications China
The Peninsula Shanghai
No. 32 The Bund. 32 Zhongshan Dong Yi Road
Shanghai 200002, China
Tel: +86-21-2327-2888-6605
Fax: +86-21-2327-2000
Email: cecilialui@peninsula.com
Website: http://www.peninsula.com
Digital Photo Library: http://www.leonardo.com/peninsula
Broadcast Video Library: http://www.thenewsmarket.com/thepeninsulahotels

Ms Sian Griffiths
Director of Communications
The Peninsula Hotels
8/F, St George's Building, 2 Ice House Street
Central, Hong Kong
Tel: +852-2840-7239
Fax: +852-2840-7499
Email: siangriffiths@peninsula.com
Website: http://www.peninsula.com
Digital Photo Library: http://www.leonardo.com/peninsula
Broadcast Video Library: http://www.thenewsmarket.com/thepeninsulahotels

PR Representative in Shanghai:
Ms Doris Yin
Client Servicing Executive
Eastwei Relations Shanghai
Rm. 203, Building G, Red Town
No. 570 W. Huaihai Rd.
Shanghai 200052
Tel: +86-21-5169-9311 ext.6132
Fax: +86-21-5230-0401
Email: doris.yin@eastwei.com
Website: http://www.eastwei.com

SOURCE The Peninsula Shanghai

Rising seas threaten Shanghai, other major cities

Rising seas threaten Shanghai, other major cities

By ELAINE KURTENBACH
The Associated Press

Monday, October 19, 2009; 12:00 AM

SHANGHAI -- This city of 20 million rose from the sea and grew into a modern showcase, with skyscrapers piercing the clouds, atop tidal flats fed by the mighty Yangtze River.

Now Shanghai's future depends on finding ways to prevent the same waters from reclaiming it.

Global warming and melting glaciers and polar ice sheets are raising sea levels worldwide, leaving tens of millions of people in coastal areas and on low-lying islands vulnerable to flooding and other weather-related catastrophes.

Shanghai, altitude roughly 3 meters (10 feet) above sea level, is among dozens of great world cities - including London, Miami, New York, New Orleans, Mumbai, Cairo, Amsterdam and Tokyo - threatened by sea levels that now are rising twice as fast as projected just a few years ago, expanding from warmth and meltwater. Estimates of the scale and timing vary, but Stefan Rahmstorf, a respected expert at Germany's Potsdam Institute, expects a 1-meter (3-foot) rise in this century and up to 5 meters (15 feet) over the next 300 years.

Chinese cities are among the largest and most threatened. Their huge populations - the Yangtze River Delta region alone has about 80 million people - and their rapid growth into giant industrial, financial and shipping centers could mean massive losses from rising sea levels, experts say.

The sea is steadily advancing on Shanghai, tainting its freshwater supplies as it turns coastal land and groundwater salty, slowing drainage of the area's heavily polluted flood basin and eating away at the precious delta soils that form the city's foundations.

Planners are slow in addressing the threat, in the apparent belief they have time. Instead, Shanghai has thrown its energies into constructing billions of dollars worth of new infrastructure: new ports, bridges, airports, industrial zones, right on the coast.

"By no means will Shanghai be under the sea 50 years from now. It won't be like the 'Day After Tomorrow' scenario," says Zheng Hongbo, a geologist who heads the School of Earth Science and Engineering at Nanjing University.

"Scientifically, though, this is a problem whether we like it or not," says Zheng, pointing to areas along Shanghai's coast thought to be shrinking due to erosion caused by rising water levels.

Chinese legend credits Emperor Yu the Great with taming floods in Neolithic times by dredging new river channels to absorb excess water. In modern times, the city has been sinking for decades, thanks to pumping of groundwater and the construction of thousands of high-rise buildings.

Today, Shanghai's engineers are reinforcing flood gates and levees to contain rivers rising due to heavy silting and subsidence.

"We used to play on the river banks and swim in the water when I was growing up. But the river is higher now," says Ma Shikang, an engineer overseeing Shanghai's main flood gate, pointing to homes below water level near the city's famed riverfront Bund.

Rising seas threaten Shanghai, other major cities

Twice daily, the 100-meter (330-foot-wide) barrier, where the city's Suzhou Creek empties into the Huangpu River, is raised and lowered in tandem with the tides and weather, regulating the city's vast labyrinth of canals and creeks.

The 5.86-meter (19-foot) high flood gate is built to withstand a one-in-1,000 years tidal surge; the highest modern Shanghai has faced so far was 5.72 meters (nearly 19 feet), during a 1997 typhoon.

Levees along the Bund and other major waterways are 6.9 meters (nearly 23 feet) high, providing better protection than in Miami, New York and many other cities. But they still would be swamped if hit by a surge like Hurricane Katrina's 8.5-meter (28-foot) onslaught.

Shanghai is considering building still bigger barriers - like those in London, Venice and the Netherlands - to fend off potentially disastrous storm surges, most likely at the point 30 kilometers (18 miles) downstream where the deep, muddy Huangpu empties into the Yangtze.

Sang Baoliang, deputy director of the Shanghai Flood Control Headquarters, has been to see the Thames Barrier, which protects London, and the Deltaworks series of storm barriers and dams in the Netherlands, where two-thirds of the population lives on land below sea level, much of it reclaimed from the sea.

Like many Chinese officials, some of whom deem the topic too sensitive to discuss, Sang is cautious about what China might do.

"We are studying this, but it is extremely complicated," said Sang, as shots from surveillance cameras at dozens of flood gates flashed on a full-wall screen.

"If the research determines that indeed the sea level will rise further, then we will need to build the walls higher. But this is still under research," he said.

Such projects usually require several decades of planning and construction, and with sea levels rising, they likely will have to be adjusted, given the unknowns of climate change.

"Nobody - no municipal or provincial government, and no central government agency - is preparing adaptation plans for Shanghai or the Yangtze Delta," says Edward Leman, whose Ottawa-based consultancy Chreod Ltd. has published research on the issue. "They must begin now, as investments and decisions made today will have a major impact in the coming years."

Nearly a quarter of mankind lives in low-lying coastal areas, and urbanization is drawing still more people into them.

"The tendency of coastal and port locations to become playgrounds for architects and developers has become a global phenomenon in recent decades," says Gordon McGranahan, director of the human settlements group at the International Institute for Environment and Development, an independent think tank in London.

McGranahan helped author a 2007 report by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development that put the number of people living in areas vulnerable to such flooding at 40 million people, with trillions of dollars of homes and other assets at risk. By the 2070s, the number could rise to nearly 150 million, it says.

Extreme weather will aggravate the already precarious situation for many: in September, Tropical Storm Kestana left 80 percent of the Philippine capital, Manila, under water. Newspaper photos showed much of Haikou, on China's southern coast, flooded, as Vietnam evacuated more than 350,000 people from the storm's path.

In years to come, some Pacific islands, like tiny Tuvalu, are expecting complete inundation. Vietnam's environment ministry estimates that more than a third of the Mekong Delta, where nearly half the country's rice is grown, will be submerged if sea levels rise by 1 meter (39 inches).

Impoverished Bangladesh is spending billions of dollars on dikes and storm shelters, while seeking international aid to help it adapt to flooding that could force up to 35 million of its people to relocate by 2050.

Though much of its land is arid, China likewise has millions of people living in densely populated tidal flats and coastal valleys who already must be evacuated during typhoons. Many of the country's biggest cities are threatened, the OECD report says.

"What has been specific to China has been the enormous coastward migration, unfortunately just at a time when it would have been better not to settle low-elevation coastal areas," McGranahan said.

Traces of former sea walls show that much of today's Shanghai, which sits between a flood basin and the sea, was under water or marshland until the 7th or 8th century AD. Over thousands of years, ancient settlements expanded and withdrew as water levels ebbed and rose.

In the future, communities unable to move may instead end up adapting buildings and infrastructure to accommodate higher water levels, says Hui-Li Lee, a landscape architect who is working on several projects in the region.

"There are many things we cannot account for, but if we know an area is going to flood, then we have to plan for that," Lee said. "When we look at a map, we have to think that 30 years later or 50 years later everything will be below sea level."

China’s Export of Its Culture Stumbles Amid State Control

October 19, 2009

Uneasy Engagement
China’s Export of Its Culture Stumbles Amid State Control

By STEVEN ERLANGER and JONATHAN ANSFIELD

FRANKFURT — As China extends its economic reach, it has also increased efforts to promote its culture, or “soft power,” to counter Western influence and improve its image in the wider world.

Yet if Chinese goods are accepted everywhere, its arts and literature, embattled at home after decades of censorship and state control, are proving harder for the government to export.

After years of delicate preparations, China was the “honored guest” this past week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest and most influential book trade event, based on the number of publishers represented. But what Beijing hoped would be a celebration of its cultural achievements turned into a tug of war between control and free speech, as much a showcase for Chinese dissidents as the state’s approved writers.

Mao Zedong said that power flowed from the “wielders of the pen,” not only from the gun. But the chairman would not be amused to find books like “Mao: The Unknown Story,” an indictment of his rule that is banned in China, displayed alongside the official Chinese exhibit at this year’s fair, which ended Sunday.

When the German organizers and diplomats urged the Chinese to allow a prominent storyteller and musician, Liao Yiwu, to come to Frankfurt, the authorities refused to lift his overseas travel ban, and told him to stop talking about it.

A symposium preceding the book fair titled “China and the World — Perceptions and Realities,” became a major confrontation. Fair organizers withdrew invitations to two dissident writers the Chinese wanted to exclude, Dai Qing and Bei Ling, but welcomed them at the last minute after criticism by journalists and politicians. When the writers made statements, the Chinese delegation walked out, only to return after an abject apology by the fair’s director, Jürgen Boos.

“We did not come to be instructed about democracy,” declared Mei Zhaorong, China’s former ambassador to Germany.

Unlike the exquisitely choreographed ceremonies during the Beijing Olympics, the fair presented a messier and more ambiguous portrait of China on the rise — a country still deeply uncomfortable with its own discordant voices, yet eager to become more competitive with the West in the realm of ideas.

China controlled its own massive display of books, artwork and authors at the fair, including even books from Taiwan, to underline its assertion of “One China.” But it could not censor the 2,500 books about China displayed by others. And while Beijing had many consultations with the German government and arguments with the fair organizers, it ultimately did not push to prevent dissidents and critics — even representatives of the Dalai Lama — from attending the event.

The book fair is not the Beijing Olympics and “cannot be controlled,” said Mr. Boos. He apologized for mishandling the symposium, but said: “It is the beginning of a cultural dialogue. And dialogue is not easy.”

Still, Chinese officials did not attend dissident events, “which were full of people who already agreed with the dissidents,” said the German novelist Tanja Kinkel. “They were preaching to the choir,” she said.

The Chinese themselves were annoyed. With SpiegelOnline headlining its coverage “China, the Unwelcome Guest,” several official Chinese delegates told colleagues that Europe’s politicians and news media were strongly biased.

Li Pengyi, a delegation member and vice president of China Publishing Group Corporation, said happily that China had sold nearly 900 copyrights here. But he complained about the coverage.

“We don’t feel we’ve been hospitably treated,” he said. “China sent more than 2,000 people to Frankfurt. And now this barrage of criticism.”

Zhao Haiyun, spokesman for China’s General Administration of Press and Publication, said that instead of focusing on literature, the media had focused on human rights and censorship. “The German media are very biased,” he said.

Even so, the Chinese did not pull out. The Beijing leadership sent Xi Jinping, China’s vice president and heir apparent to President Hu Jintao, a measure of the political weight they attached to the event.

Michael Naumann, a former German culture minister and now publisher and editor of Die Zeit, a prominent weekly newspaper, said German organizers misjudged the complications of honoring China in a year laden with controversy, including the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 20th anniversary of the crushed Tiananmen Square democracy movement and the 60th anniversary of Chinese Communist Party rule.

“I think the people who run the book fair were kind of naïve when they invited the Chinese,” he said. “But opening this enormous window of the book fair to Chinese writers, whether they are censored or not, will give them a way to sniff out the open forum of intellectual debate.”

Since 2004, China has pursued what it calls its “going out” policy on the cultural front, trying to square its economic influence and new status as a global power, while trying to defuse criticism on issues like Tibet, Taiwan and human rights.

There have been yearlong cultural exchanges with many countries; the opening of hundreds of language teaching centers known as Confucius Institutes; new foreign-language services from official media like Xinhua and CCTV; and new interest in foreign platforms like the Kennedy Center and the Europalia festival in Brussels.

There have been other furors. When China was featured at the 2004 Paris Book Fair, officials initially persuaded the French not to invite the Nobel literature laureate Gao Xingjian, a French citizen whose books are banned in China.

But Frankfurt, with its 7,300 publishers and 300,000 visitors, was a much riskier venture.

Jing Bartz has been the fair’s chief representative in Beijing since 2003 and negotiated strenuously with Chinese publication officials. “China has really wanted to use this platform to promote Chinese culture,” she said. “On the other side, they are worried because they can’t use Chinese rules to do it.”

What helped persuade China was the cultural trade gap. At the 2005 Beijing book fair, the Chinese were shocked that German publishers sold 600 copyrighted works to China while the Chinese sold just one to Germany, Mrs. Bartz said.

Chinese officials worried particularly that the Dalai Lama might attend, or that books would be displayed from adversaries like the banned movement Falun Gong.

The breakthrough came in 2006, said Mrs. Bartz, when Shi Zongyuan, then head of the General Administration of Press and Publication, told organizers: “We just have to make it very clear what is our guest of honor program, and what are the other events.”

China invested $15 million and managed nearly every detail of its exhibition. There was much argument over what translations to finance. The 20 new German-published volumes China financed include works by major writers, like Jiang Rong’s “Wolf Totem,” Yu Hua’s “Brothers,” and Xu Zechen’s “Running Through Zhongguancun.”

Mr. Xu’s hit, about a migrant hawking pirated DVDs and fake IDs in the capital, was unexpected. But of some 100 newly translated titles that China promoted, most are banal introductions to China from state publishers.

“The government has not put on such a concentrated, large-scale event before to promote Chinese literature, so I think it’s a good opportunity,” said Mr. Xu, 31. “Because of the government’s involvement, there are inevitably going to be these ideological problems. But we just have to be responsible to ourselves.”

Since the uproar over the symposium last month, said Mr. Boos and Mrs. Bartz, China has appeared more relaxed. Officials eventually gave up protesting the attendance of those like the Uighur independence advocate Rebiya Kadeer; the Dalai Lama’s envoy, Kelsang Gyaltsen; Ms. Dai, Mr. Bei or Mr. Gao.

“They tried to learn,” Mrs. Bartz said. But she confirmed that while the Chinese were “very satisfied with the business results” of the fair, “they don’t really feel they were welcomed as guests here.” The word went down from the top, she said, not to react to demonstrations or provocations from protesters or journalists.

Back in China, however, the fair has not brought any noticeable easing of restrictions.

Mr. Liao, the writer and musician, was imprisoned from 1990 to 1994 after he wrote a poem about the Tiananmen massacre. Despite an invitation here — he hoped to promote his book about China’s downtrodden, known in English as “The Corpse Walker” — the police would not lift a ban on his going overseas.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Liao said it was not a complete loss for him or other underground writers, given the publicity. “Only by going through these incidents, it seems, can we become known to the outside world,” he said.

Steven Erlanger reported from Frankfurt, and Jonathan Ansfield from Beijing

Lotte Shopping Said to Agree to Buy Control of China’s Times

Lotte Shopping Said to Agree to Buy Control of China’s Times

By Cathy Chan

Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Lotte Shopping Co., South Korea’s biggest department store owner, agreed to buy control of Times Ltd. in a deal that values the Chinese supermarket operator at about $625 million, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

Seoul-based Lotte Shopping will purchase a 72.3 percent stake in Times from Chairman Kenneth Fang for about HK$5.50 per share, 19 percent above Times’s latest traded price, and will make an offer for the rest of the company, the people said, asking not to be identified because the talks are private.

Lotte Shopping beat out China’s Wumart Stores Inc. to clinch the biggest acquisition in the country by a Korean company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Lotte Shopping, which operates a department store in Beijing, will add 65 outlets in the world’s fastest-growing major economy with the purchase.

Times may announce the deal as early as today, the people said. A call to the company’s Hong Kong office outside of regular business hours went unanswered.

“We are currently in the final stage of talks with a positive stance, but we have no information on the size or the value of the stake,” said Lee Sun Dae, a spokesman for Lotte in Seoul.

Wumart, Beijing’s biggest supermarket chain, said Sept. 24 it has held talks with Times. Shares in Times were suspended on Oct. 12 in Hong Kong after rising to a two-year high, taking its market value to $523 million.

Lotte Shopping said Oct. 16 in a regulatory filing that it plans to invest an additional 732.7 billion won ($622 million) in its Hong Kong unit, which will use the proceeds to expand in China and Hong Kong.

Nomura Holdings Inc. is advising Lotte Shopping and HSBC Holdings Plc represents Times. Annie Cheng, a spokeswoman at HSBC, declined to comment. Nomura spokesman Matthew Russell didn’t return an e-mail seeking comment.

To contact the reporter on this story: Cathy Chan in Hong Kong at kchan14@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 18, 2009 12:00 EDT

U.S. Enlists Oil to Sway Beijing's Stance on Tehran

BUSINESS

OCTOBER 19, 2009

U.S. Enlists Oil to Sway Beijing's Stance on Tehran

By JAY SOLOMON

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is encouraging key Arab states to boost oil exports to China in order to reduce Beijing's reliance on Iranian energy and pare Chinese resistance to tougher sanctions over Tehran's nuclear program.

The administration's strategy has yielded a gain: in a step coordinated with Washington, the United Arab Emirates recently agreed to boost oil exports to China to between 150,000 to 200,000 barrels a day from a current level of 50,000 over the next six months, according to U.S. and Emirati officials.

A senior Emirati official said Abu Dhabi plans to make a significant additional increase "within the next three years."

Saudi Arabia, long at odds with Tehran, also appears prepared to offer China more oil to make up for any losses it incurs as part of an international effort to punish Iran, according to people familiar with Saudi thinking.

The kingdom buys considerable weapons, natural resources and consumer products from China, and is weighing how to leverage those purchases to persuade Beijing to distance itself from Tehran.

The U.S. strategy is as much about realigning diplomatic alliances as shifting the oil supply, U.S. officials said.

Many diplomats and Middle East analysts are skeptical that the U.S. and the Arab states will succeed over the long term in breaking Beijing's reliance on Iranian energy.

Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are both constrained in exporting oil by quotas established by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Industry analysts question how the two countries could significantly boost exports to China without flouting those quotas and flooding markets with excess oil.

Washington and its European allies increasingly view China as the pivotal player in an international effort to pressure Tehran economically over its nuclear program. Iranian officials are scheduled to meet representatives from the U.S., France and Russia in Vienna on Monday in a bid to conclude an agreement for the international community to better monitor and manage Tehran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium.

Growing sanctions against Iran could lead to significant instability in the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. could be important partners in guaranteeing Beijing's continued oil supply. China's consumption is expected to grow to about 20 million barrels of oil a day by 2030 from its current level of eight millions barrels a day.

Saudi Arabia is the largest oil exporter to China, sending 740,000 barrels a day during the first five months of 2009. Iran is the second-largest supplier at about 540,000 barrels a day.

"We've been telling the Arab states to directly express their concerns to Russia and China about Iran's actions," said a U.S. official involved in the dialogue. "And we stressed that they should use their leverage."

Beijing is the second-largest buyer of Iranian oil. The Asian giant has pledged tens of billions of dollars in new investment in Iran's oil and gas infrastructure in coming years. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao damped U.S. hopes for broad cooperation on Iran last week, praising Beijing's "widened and deepened" relationship with Tehran following a meeting with Iranian Vice President Reza Rahimi.

China and Russia have the ability to block new sanctions proposals being discussed at the United Nations Security Council. Beijing has repeatedly expressed opposition to enacting expansive financial penalties against Tehran.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Beijing's National Energy Administration didn't respond to requests for comment about the U.A.E. offer of additional oil.

A spokesman at Saudi Arabia's Washington office didn't respond to requests for comment.

Beijing also views Iran as a crucial partner in helping China achieve energy independence. China is investing in massive joint exploration, extraction and refining projects in Iran. Oil-industry analysts note that many of China's energy ventures in Iran have yet to bear fruit, due to technological deficiencies and contract disputes. But Beijing is still seen as unwilling to turn its back on opportunities to develop China's own refining and extraction capabilities.

"The Chinese are wooing Iran because they are banking that the best energy security is to be their own producers," said Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

U.S. officials, however, view the U.A.E.'s action as an important early signal from a key oil-producing Arab state.

—Sue Feng contributed to this article.

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com

The Road to Copenhagen

The Road to Copenhagen

Gavan McCormack

In September, after its warmest August on record, Australia’s East coast was shrouded in thick red dust. Visibility was reduced to metres, forcing cancelation of flights and driving people indoors as some five million tonnes of soil blew in from the country’s vast interior where the drought is in its ninth year. Early in the same month, Koreans were told that in future snow was likely to disappear in their country save for a few mountain peaks, and that their climate would become sub-tropical. Elsewhere, the Arctic sea-ice crumbles, opening navigation and exploration routes into the polar regions, glaciers retreat, half the world’s tropical and temperate forests, wetlands, and coral have gone or are threatened; storms, floods, and other natural disasters ripple around the world. Scientists warn of approaching global catastrophe.

Australia facing record temperatures

The UN Environment Program’s latest study tells us that, even if the international community enacts every climate policy so far proposed global temperatures will still rise significantly through this century. Whatever we do now we “cannot reduce the already committed GHGs [global greenhouse gases] warming of 2.4 degrees Celsius.” The world’s preeminent climatologists, according to the report in the April issue of the scientific journal, Nature, estimate that even with a moderate warming (20C) we stand “a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations.” That is our future, and the outlook is steadily worsening.

At Copenhagen we have to reach global consensus to launch a campaign – amounting in intensity to wartime mobilization – to try to arrest, or at least slow, the degeneration of the world as we know it into the catastrophe of climate chaos. The December conference becomes the most important event in the history of humanity, our last chance.

Global NGOs, including Greenpeace and WWF, estimate that we need at Copenhagen a commitment to a global carbon cut of 40 per cent cut by 2020 and 80 per cent (95 per cent for the industrial countries) by mid-century. Another way of putting it is to say that the Kyoto targets – only reached in a few places – now have to be multiplied by two to three times in the short term and up to ten times in the medium term.

At present, despite the commitments many countries have made since Kyoto in 1997 to reduce them, they are rising steadily. Globally, greenhouse emissions rose by 38 per cent between 1992 and 2007, increasing from a rate of 1.1 per cent annually in the 1990s to 3.5 per cent in 2000-2007. The specialist literature is punctuated increasingly by bleak words: threshold, tipping-point, irreversibility. We are destabilizing the climatic conditions under which over the last several millennia humanity developed agriculture, villages, cities, civilizations.

World fossil fuel emissions, 1990-2007

Human activity, pumping carbon into the atmosphere at steadily increasing rates ever since the industrial revolution has raised the pre-industrial concentration of carbon in the atmosphere (280 ppm) to 387 ppm, and that level continues to rise by around 3.1 ppm per year. On a “business as usual” projection of our current trajectory, we are headed towards an end of century carbon concentration figure of around 950 ppm and a temperature rise of 4.60C.

To hold temperature increase to around 2 degrees, the world’s scientists meeting in Bali in 2007 insisted that we must at all costs keep levels of atmospheric carbon concentration below 450 ppm. The EU and Australia have now adopted that goal. However, many scientists think that the real tipping point is more likely to be 400 ppm – in any case now unavoidable and imminent - and highly influential ones, including Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, think that, as a matter of urgency, we should reduce it to 350. Even if all cuts pledged by countries around the world as of this moment were realized, the temperature rise will still be in the order of 3.5 degrees, ie. almost twice the previous “worst case” scenarios.

For Australia, where a reformist and climate-conscious government took office in 2008, the subsequent commitment to 450 ppm has grim implications. It takes for granted continuing and worsening ravages of drought, fire, extreme summer heat up to 45 degrees in Southern Australia in 2008), and – since it is a big country – floods. Already drought in the country’s grain basket, the Murray-Darling River basin, has drastically reduced the output of irrigated crops and forced complete suspension of rice agriculture in the past two seasons. Most shocking of all, with a 450 ppm carbon concentration in the atmosphere, the Great Barrier Reef – one of the wonders of the world - will not survive.

In Japan too, a reforming, climate conscious government took office in September 2009 and immediately announced a commitment to a 25 per cent reduction on its 1990 emissions by 2020. Even under the previous LDP governments, Japan has sometimes been seen as a model of clean and efficient energy, but the fact is that it not only failed to meet its 6 per cent Kyoto reduction target but its emissions grew by 11 per cent to 2007. That was better, to be sure, than the US (+20 per cent), but it pales before the accomplishment of countries such as Germany which cut its emissions by 21 per cent.

Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio’s 25 per cent “reduction on 1990 levels” is a bold promise, and it stands in relief compared to the paltry US gestures thus far. However, Hatoyama has yet to persuade industry or to develop a blueprint of how to accomplish it, his pledge is conditional on a Copenhagen agreement in which “all major economies participate,” and because of the failure of the post-Kyoto decade his 25 per cent of 1990 levels actually means he has to cut current levels by 36 per cent. And, if he accomplishes all that, in terms of what is needed it represents no more than a first step.

As for South Korea, its greenhouse gas emissions have been growing at the highest rate among OECD counties (increasing by 90 per cent between 1990 and 2005), and its thus far announced short-term (to 2020) goal is to hold them to an increase of not more than 8 per cent above its 2005 levels. Should it take that stance to Copenhagen, Korea is unlikely to fare well. Facing global catastrophe, any industrial country that talks of increasing its carbon emissions can expect to be told to go back and re-consider its global responsibilities.

South Korea’s carbon emissions

Short of some technological breakthrough (of which at present there is no sign), the political and moral imperative is that we shift from non-renewable, carbon-intensive to renewable, carbon-neutral economic activity, cut back on production, consumption, and waste in the “conventional” carbon sector, husband existing resources and find more equitable and less wasteful ways of distributing them, eliminating the unnecessary and inefficient. Yet, as I wrote in this column in 2008 (“The Chimera of Growth,” March 2008), humanity’s shared, quasi-religious faith, shared by Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and atheists alike, is that human society must be organized so as to maximize production, consumption, and waste. GDP scale and growth is currently the major indicator of the “success” of countries.

December’s Copenhagen meeting calls therefore for a Copernican shift so that henceforth countries will be evaluated not for their GDP but for their success a global citizens in cutting back greenhouse gas emissions. The growth fetish has to be set aside lest our decline into climate chaos, punctuated by water wars, oil wars, food wars, and epidemics, becomes irreversible. The Kyoto, Bali, and other major conferences on climate change were no more than feeble nudges in the direction humanity has to go. Copenhagen must go much further.

This is the text of a column written for Kyunghyang Shinmoon and published on October 13, 2009.

Gavan McCormack is emeritus professor at Australian National University in Canberra, a coordinator at Japan Focus, and author of Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe and Client State: Japan in the American Embrace.

Recommended citation: Gavan McCormack, "The Road to Copenhagen," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 42-3-09, October 19, 2009.

Software Pirates in China Beat Microsoft to the Punch

Software Pirates in China Beat Microsoft to the Punch

Published: October 18, 2009

TAIPEI — At shops in the bustling Xinyang market in Shanghai, fake Apple iPhones and Bose speakers were displayed alongside bootleg copies of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, a week before it officially was to go on sale.

“Which version do you want? Ultimate? Normal? English or Chinese?” one shopkeeper asked, proudly pointing out her ample supply of discs packed in unmarked white boxes.

People in mainland China have been able to buy pirated copies of the newest version of Microsoft’s Windows franchise this month for just 20 yuan, or $2.93, each — a fraction of list prices, which are as high as $320.

Windows 7’s “early release” in China underscores the challenge major software makers face in trying to make money in China, the world’s second-largest PC market, after the United States.

The U.S. research firm IDC estimated that about 80 percent of software sold in China last year was pirated. While that figure is falling, it is still double the global average and about four times the average in developed markets like the United States and Japan.

“The big issue that is driving piracy in China today is price,” said Matthew Cheung, an analyst at the research firm Gartner. “If you’re trying to sell a program that costs 2,000 yuan to a student living on 400 yuan a month, that’s simply not going to work out for most consumers.”

In a nod to such pressures, Microsoft cut the price of its Office 2007 Home and Student Edition to 199 yuan last year from 699 yuan.

And Microsoft will sell its low-end Windows 7 Home Basic version for 399 yuan, a modest price by Western standards but still 15 times as much as is charged for pirated copies.

Violation of intellectual property rights has been a sore spot in China’s relations with its major trading partners, even as it has cracked down on rampant piracy of everything from Gucci bags to software.

A Chinese court jailed four people in August for spreading a bootleg version of Microsoft’s Windows XP, in what Xinhua, the official news agency, called the nation’s biggest software piracy bust.

“A lot of people are used to getting away with it for a long time,” said Steve Vickers, president of FTI-International Risk. “There are signs that law enforcement is picking up, and that should help things improve.”

Business Software Alliance, a trade association created by the software industry, said the sector had lost more than $6.6 billion in China last year to piracy.

Most experts agree that piracy in China is a long-term issue, but many say that conditions should improve as software makers cut prices, users become more educated and living standards rise.

“Piracy in China is reducing year by year because the government is placing more attention on it and prices between the real and fake have narrowed,” said Qian Liyong, director of the E.U.-China Project on the protection of intellectual property rights, based in Beijing.

Gartner estimated that software piracy rates in mainland China would fall as low as 50 percent by 2012, putting it almost on a par with rates in developed Asian markets like Hong Kong.

Customer education is also improving in mainland China as many realize the dangers of installing pirated software, which sometimes comes with viruses and spyware.

“This is a long-term issue — 10-20 years — it’s not just going to go away in an instant,” said Edward Yu, chief executive of Analysys International, a research firm.

In a bid to tackle the problem, Microsoft began an unconventional campaign in China last year that caused a black screen to be displayed every hour for users of pirated versions of Windows XP.

But that just caused thousands of irate users to migrate to free software from domestic companies like Kingsoft.

Some say that free Web-based software, supported by advertising, may ultimately help to reduce piracy in China by letting third parties pay for development costs.

“Because of the Internet, we are seeing a trend that software is by and large becoming free for consumers from point to point,” Mr. Yu said.

Princess Aiko’s relay race

A video of Princess Aiko, daughter of Crown Prince Naruhito, participating in her school’s Sports Day (undokai) festivities:

The second half of the clip contains footage of Naruhito running in the same relay back when he was 7-years-old.

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Japan to relax visa requirements for Chinese tourists+

Japan to relax visa requirements for Chinese tourists+

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Men going to great lengths for beautiful skin

Men going to great lengths for beautiful skin
Shoichi Shirahaze / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

Skin care items are not just for "metrosexuals" any more, as marketers cater to an increasing number of men who are putting priority on cosmetic considerations.

According to the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry, sales of men's skin care cosmetics in 2008 totaled 17.6 billion yen, a 16.9 percent increase from the previous year.

Nivea-Kao Co. became the first to offer a men's skin care brand in 2002, followed by Shiseido Co. in 2004 and Roht Pharmaceutical Co. in 2006.

Yoshiaki Okabe, a Shiseido official who took part in developing the company's men's skin care brand, said, "More men are spending money on skin care items thanks to the appearance of men's cosmetics items at several department stores as well as due to the 'choi-waru oyaji' [trendy middle-aged playboy] boom."

Meanwhile, Kaori Sutani, a public relations officer at Mandom Corp., said men, mostly younger ones, have begun paying attention to their skin, partly due to the popularization of sending e-mail photo attachments. According to a Mandom survey, the usage rate of facial wash among men reached 59.4 percent in 2009, compared with the 48.8 percent figure registered in 2005. When the question focused on university students, the rate soared to more than 85 percent.

Other men's cosmetic products, such as beauty essence, milky lotion and cream preparations, also recently have hit the market. One can find large selections of these items at drugstores and special cosmetic counters staffed by skin counselors at department stores.

Male skin is said to contain more oil and less moisture than female skin. Skin care experts recommend that men keep their facial skin clean by frequently washing and using moisturizing products.

(Oct. 19, 2009)

Crime rife at Net cafes that don't require ID

Crime rife at Net cafes that don't require ID
The Yomiuri Shimbun

Tokyo police are considering making it mandatory for Net cafe operators to ask customers to show identification after a survey found nearly 75 percent of crimes committed at cybercafes occurred at shops that did not check the ID of customers.

Fewer than 40 percent of Net cafes in the capital ask their customers to show ID, according to a Metropolitan Police Department survey of 561 Net cafes known to be operating in Tokyo as of the end of August.

The MPD launched an expert advisory panel Saturday to consider measures to stem the crimes--including theft, hacking and rape--occurring in Net cafes. One step the panel will discuss is making it obligatory for Net cafes to confirm the identification of their customers, according to the MPD.

Just 214 of the Net cafes surveyed, or 38.1 percent, asked customers to show ID when entering their premises.

There were 679 crimes reported in Tokyo's Net cafes from January to the end of August. Of them, 505, or 74 percent, took place at Net cafes that did not check customer ID.

Thefts of bags and other possessions topped the list with 579 incidents, followed by 67 cases of fraud and seven robberies with violence.

A youth arrested by police on suspicion of stealing items from private booths late at night reportedly told police that the Net cafes were easy targets. "The booths have no locks and many people leave their booths unattended," he reportedly said.

Since around 2006, cases of using computers at Net cafes for unlawful purposes such as hacking and purchasing illegal drugs online have been steadily increasing, investigators said.

Even rapes have been reported at Net cafes. A 28-year-old part-time worker arrested on suspicion of indecently assaulting a young girl in a booth for couples at a Net cafe reportedly told police that the booth had a mattress and "could not be seen from the outside."

Girls who have run away from home have been found using computers at Net cafes to trawl for people willing to pay them for sex, the MPD said.

Billing fraud gangs have stationed members charged with withdrawing money from victims' accounts at Net cafes.

The MPD has been urging Net cafe operators since 2007 to verify the identity of their customers with ID bearing a photograph and keep computer records.

Compliance with the MPD requests, however, has been left to discretion of the cafes, and no penalties are slapped on cafes that fail to comply.

Just 38.1 percent of Net cafes complied with the MPD request in the latest survey, edging down from 40.6 percent in a survey a year before, and only 13.9 percent stored computer usage records, down from 24.6 percent a year earlier, the MPD noted.

Some Net cafes reportedly told MPD officers that they stopped asking customers to show ID because many cafe users disliked the practice.

The Japan Complex Cafe Association, a nationwide federation of 1,263 Net cafe operators, plans to ask its members to tighten their checks of customers.

"We'll boost efforts to confirm cafe users' identification because doing so would bring in more users if they know they can enter and feel safe," an association official said.

(Oct. 19, 2009)

Water shortages hit south China

Water shortages hit south China

Source: Xinhua
2009-10-19

SEVERE drought over the past months has stunted rice crops, threatened reservoirs and left hundreds of thousands of people short of drinking water in southern Chinese provinces.

In the southern Guangdong Province, where rain in the first 10 months fell by 14 percent compared with averages in past years, more than 55,000 hectares of cropland are affected and 50,000 people are facing difficulties in getting drinking water because of the drought.

Water level in Guangdong's dams continued to drop. According to Guangdong Provincial Flooding and Drought Relief Headquarters, water levels in Guangdong's 32 key reservoirs have reported a year-on-year decrease of 2.34 billion cubic meters.

The drought is continuing to take a toll on agricultural production in the province.

"I've never seen such a severe drought in my life," said a 73-year-old farmer in Zhoutian Township, Shaoguan City. "A great deal of crops have been damaged."

There have also been concerns of further crop damage as drought harms plants' ability to weather the winter.

In Nan'ao Island of Shantou City, home to more than 70,000 people, drought has left residents struggling to bathe and do the laundry.

More than 70,000 people in Zhangzhou City in the southeastern Fujian Province are also short of drinking water.

Hydraulic experts attribute the water shortage to the lingering drought as well as a shortage of reservoirs, where construction has lagged behind China's industrialization and urbanization.

In the central Hunan Province, low water levels in Dongting Lake, China's second largest fresh water lake, have forced local fishermen out of work.

"October used to be a 'golden season' for fishing in the lake," said fisherman Gong Jianmin. "But now we can't go out to fish since the low water period has come early this year because of the drought."

In eastern Jiangxi Province, most cities have recorded a 66 percent drop in rainfall.

Villagers relocated to make way for reservoir

Villagers relocated to make way for reservoir
Source: Xinhua
2009-10-19

A RESETTLEMENT project involving 330,000 people living in central China's Hubei and Henan provinces has started to make way for China's south-north water diversion project, according to resettlement authorities in Henan yesterday.

People will be relocated from their homes near the Danjiangkou reservoir, where a sluice will be built to divert water from the Yangtze River to thirsty northern China regions including Beijing, Tianjin, Henan and Hebei.

Sources with the resettlement headquarters in Henan said the provincial government has approved new settlement areas with convenient traffic conditions and good soil quality.

Henan's Xichuan County will see the resettlement of 162,000 people, the largest number in a single county, in 185 new villages.

Resettlement in the province is scheduled to be completed in 2011, according to Henan's authorities.

Each resettled family will be given 0.1 hectare of land per person and an annual subsidy of 600 yuan (US$88) each for 20 years, according to Duan Shiyao, deputy chief of Hubei Provincial Resettlement Bureau.

The resettlement project is the country's second largest following a similar scheme for the Three Gorges Hydro-Power Project, where 1.27 million people were moved.

U.S.-Japan ties get early test ahead of Obama visit

U.S.-Japan ties get early test ahead of Obama visit
Sun Oct 18, 2009 7:30am EDT
By Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A trip by the U.S. defense secretary to Tokyo this week will offer an early test of ties with Japan's new government, which swept to power last month promising a more independent path from Washington.

The change of guard in Japan has raised uncertainty among investors watching the pivotal role of the U.S. alliance in a region that is also home to North Korea, an unpredictable and reclusive state that is pursuing a nuclear program.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose trip will include South Korea, will give assurances of Washington's "full-throated commitment" to defend allies in Asia from any threat from North Korea after its latest missile test, U.S. defense officials said.

But Gates is also expected to seek assurances during his visit on Tuesday and Wednesday that Japan's new government will honor past security accords, clearing away possible sources of friction before President Barack Obama's visit next month.

Those include a contentious agreement on rejigging U.S. forces in Japan, home to 48,000 U.S. troops.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama wants a Marine air base moved off Okinawa island -- an option U.S. officials rule out. They say it would undermine broader security arrangements long in the making.

"It's been in the works for 15 years. ... You start to pull on one thread and you run the risk of the whole thing unraveling," said one defense official, briefing journalists before the trip on the condition he not be named.

Washington also wants Japan to come forward with new forms of assistance to Afghanistan, if Tokyo follows through with plans to halt a naval refueling mission backing coalition forces, the official said.

"That contribution does not have to be a military one. In fact, a lot of the very valuable contributions in Afghanistan are on the development side and the training side," he said.

Japan's defense minister said on Tuesday that Tokyo would end its refueling mission in support of coalition operations in Afghanistan, but a top government spokesman said a decision had yet to be made.

Analysts expressed optimism that Tokyo and Washington would reaffirm their historically strong ties, despite a new government in Japan and a young administration in Washington.

"The Japanese will be reassuring him (Gates) that nothing much is going to change, even though they've made a lot of noise," said Phil Deans, professor of international affairs at Temple University's Tokyo campus.

SOUTH KOREA HANDOVER

After Japan, Gates heads to South Korea, where nearly 29,000 U.S. soldiers are stationed to help defend against North Korea, which fired five short-range missiles on October 12.

The Pentagon called those tests "unhelpful and potentially destabilizing" and senior U.S. officials immediately traveled to Tokyo and then Seoul last week to assure allies the United States could defend them, officials said.

"North Korea is obviously trying to achieve break-out as a nuclear weapons state. We will never accept this," one official said.

Asked whether there were concerns that Asian allies might pursue their own nuclear programs to defend against North Korea, a U.S. official said the hope was that a strong U.S. commitment would steer them away from "the nuclear option."

Gates' trip to Seoul also comes amid a major restructuring of the U.S. military alliance with South Korea, forged during the 1950-53 Korean War. Seoul is set to take wartime control of its forces by 2012.

"We think it's a natural evolution of the alliance, that it's time now 60 years after the start of the Korean War," an official said.

Officials said Gates was set to confirm progress toward the handover.

"That will be one of the issues that will be discussed," he added. "And we fully expect that we will endorse the progress we've made and that we're on target for transfer in 2012."

South Korea's 650,000 troops face about 1.1 million in North Korea, which devotes the bulk of its resources to its military despite a struggling economy.

(Additional reporting by Isabel Reynolds in Tokyo; Editing by Paul Eckert and John O'Callaghan)

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

Straits' slim limits set to let U.S. nukes pass

Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009

Straits' slim limits set to let U.S. nukes pass
Kyodo News

Japan decided in the 1970s to set narrow territorial limits on five key straits to allow passage of U.S. warships carrying nuclear weapons, a former envoy who represented Japan at U.N. talks on international maritime law said in a recent interview.

Some of the U.S. submarines that passed through Japanese territorial waters or called at Japanese ports during the Cold War were carrying nuclear weapons, said Shigeru Oda, who represented Japan during talks on the U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea. Oda said the decision to let them pass was a political one.

Countries involved in the 1973-1982 talks agreed to allow territorial waters to be set at a maximum of 12 nautical miles (22 km) from shore.

Under the Territorial Waters Act that took effect in 1977, Japan expanded its territorial waters to 12 nautical miles from the previous limit of 3 nautical miles (5.6 km).

But the limits on Japan's territorial waters in the Soya, Tsugaru, Osumi, Tsushima and Korea straits were mysteriously left unchanged at 3 nautical miles.

The Foreign Ministry demanded that Oda not disclose how and why the decision was made in a book he was writing after leaving the ministry in 1976, he said, adding he eventually gave in to the demand.

He went on to become a judge at the International Court of Justice that year and served until 2003.

"The Tsugaru Strait would have become Japan's territorial waters (if the limit was expanded to 12 nautical miles)," Oda, 84, said.

"In order to say 'no bringing in nuclear weapons' and 'submarines must surface when passing through Japan's territorial waters,' you could not make the limit 12 nautical miles," he said, referring to the three nonnuclear principles of prohibiting possession, production or introduction of nuclear arms on Japanese territory.

Japan needed to keep the limits in the five straits at 3 nautical miles so it could deny that U.S. ships or subs with nuclear weapons were plying official Japanese waters, he said.

Official U.S. documents and testimony from people involved with the issue have already confirmed that Japan voluntarily chose to set narrow limits on the straits and that pressure from the United States was involved in the matter.

Okada urges understanding for Taiji

Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009

Okada urges understanding for Taiji
Kyodo News

Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada on Friday called for people to respect other countries' cultures and habits after environmental conservation groups criticized the annual dolphin slaughters in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture.

Dolphin hunting in the town was thrust into the international spotlight after the U.S. documentary "The Cove," which highlighted the issue, was screened in the United States, Australia and other countries, including, after a delay, Japan.

"Various things can be edible depending on each country . . . I would like (people) to understand that culture is diverse," Okada said at a news conference.

Although the foreign minister admitted he has not seen the film himself, he nonetheless suggested there were parts of it that are untrue.

"The Cove" is among films to be shown during the 22nd Tokyo International Film Festival, which kicked off Saturday.

China only trails U.S. in billionaires

China only trails U.S. in billionaires

Story Highlights
* Number of billionaires in China grows to 130, according to report
* Actual number of billionaires may be up to 260, according to man who compiles list
* Wealthy in China hard to track because they want to avoid government scrutiny
* Most who made list made fortunes due to real estate, similar ventures

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- China ranks second only to the United States in the number of billionaires, according to an annual report of the 1,000 richest people in the country.

The Hurun Rich List counted 130 billionaires in China this year, up from 101 a year ago and none in 2003.

An additional 825,000 people had personal wealth of more than $1.5 million, said Rupert Hoogewerf, an accountant who has compiled the list since 1998.

"You can double the real number of billionaires in China to 260," said Hoogewerf in a statement. "There are still a large number of billionaires off the radar screens."

Often, wealthy people in China try to avoid the scrutiny of tax authorities by keeping their finances private.

The man who topped the list last year, for example, is under arrest for alleged financial irregularities.

The most prominent dropout from the list is injured Houston Rockets basketball player Yao Ming, whose fortune was valued at $100 million last year.

The list indicates that China's wealthy have been buffered from the global financial meltdown, which has tycoons in other countries reeling.

A separate list, released in June by Capgemeni SA and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, found that China's economy grew by 9 percent last year, even as the United States and Europe slipped into recession.

That list found that the combined riches of China's millionaires surpassed that of the United Kingdom's.

Most business owners who made the Hurun list -- both as billionaires and millionaires -- made their fortune in real estate and related industries as China has undergone dizzying urbanization.

The construction ministry estimates that the country's urban population will increase by 300 million people by 2025.

Few of those making the list relied on exports to Western economies.

But the richest man in China this year, Wang Chuanfu, jumped 102 places to the top after billionaire U.S. investor Warren Buffett agreed to buy a 10 percent stake in his company.

Buffett's announcement sent shares in Wang's company, BYD, surging 387 percent this year.

The company initially made its name with rechargeable cell phone batteries, but this year launched mass production of a plug-in hybrid electric car.

Other highlights from the list:

Less than 1 percent on the list inherited their wealth, compared with 25 percent in the United Kingdom and 35 percent in the United States.

The typical rich list member is a 50-year-old self-made man who started out 16 years ago and has made his money from property development.

102 women were among China's 1,000 richest. Chinese women make up more than half the world's richest self-made women.

The top three hobbies of wealthy Chinese are travel, swimming and golf. The United States, Australia and France are their preferred destinations.

Though the list mentions China as second to the United States in the number of billionaires, it did not specify how many the latter produced.

A Forbes magazine tally of the world's richest people, released in March, counted 359billionaires in America.

Learning to drink like a local in Qingdao, China

Learning to drink like a local in Qingdao, China

Story Highlights
* Qingdao is located in northeast China, north of Shanghai
* The city hosts a beer festival and is home to distinctive European architecture
* The Tsingtao Brewery was founded in 1903 by German settlers

October 16, 2009 -- Updated 0228 GMT (1028 HKT)

By Frances McCullers
For CNN

QINGDAO, China (CNN) -- Another round of toasts and exclamations of "hajiu" sounded out around me. I took a sip and set down my small glass of Tsingtao beer as my new friends downed theirs and refilled. Our seafood dinner, perched on the single cluttered table of a tiny antique shop, was punctuated regularly by such moments.

I joined in happily, although somewhat bemused, at each increasingly beery celebration of our host, the worldly Captain Jau. My company, a gathering from four regions of China, was engaging me in Chinese drinking etiquette, in the city of Qingdao.

A few drinks in the People's Republic of China led me to discover European delights and other unexpected finds in this modest city.

You'd be forgiven for not knowing where Qingdao (pronounced Chingdao) is. The Chinese city in Shandong province doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as Beijing, Shanghai, or even Xi'an.

The 2008 Olympics gave it a place on the map as China's sailing hub; no longer a secret that holiday-making officials could keep for themselves.

But my American spell-check doesn't recognize it (which says more about my spell-check), and you can still find pre-Cultural Revolution manhole covers. So what is it about this city that seduces the unassuming traveler?

Nestled on the coast of Shandong province, almost exactly halfway between its big sisters, Beijing and Shanghai, Qingdao features as a handy pit-stop on East coast itineraries. It boasts great infrastructure, a charming climate, alfresco eateries, good coffee, sandy beaches, German history, international hotels, a brand new airport and even a famous brewery.

Qingdao could pass itself off as a miniature Seattle if it weren't for the fact that pretty much no one outside of the five-star hotels speaks English, and that communism still articulates itself through the tourist beaches, stoically named Number One to Number Six.

"In mainland China, Qingdao's history is uniquely international; in fact, more of the city's cultural identity is wrapped up in its German colonial past than even its prominent role in the emergence of Daoism" said Eric Blocher, editor of the English-language magazine Red Star.

"The local culture bureau once joked to us that Qingdao is a 'cultural desert', because it doesn't have the dynastic lineage of Nanjing or Xi'an, or opera for that matter," Blocher said. "But that's not what makes a city livable, or even fun -- if your office is in downtown, you're never more than five minutes from a protected beach; there's always excellent seafood close at hand; you can buy China's best beer fresh, for 10 cents a pound, and walk around drinking it out of a plastic bag."

Following this key advice, I visited Qingdao during the International Beer Festival in late August, an event aimed largely at a domestic Chinese market. The West knows beer. China does not. The annual Beer Festival aims to change this. While the bright lights and myriad beers flowed, one thing was obvious: this was for the tourists.

True Qingdaonese people are fiercely proud of Tsingtao beer, produced just down the road on Beer Street, and little else is drunk here in homes or bars. Pijiu, beer in Mandarin, is hajiu in Qingdaonese, the regional dialect. When in doubt, this does as well for a toast as anything else. Indeed, there is no better way of celebrating an occasion than by toasting the guest of honor with a bag of fresh beer.

If I was the guest of honor at Captain Jau's table, I certainly wasn't living up to expectations. Particularly not for my self-appointed etiquette guardian and "pure Qingdao boy," Loukas. As I raised my glass for a sip and Loukas jumped to toast the good weather for the nth time, it all became clear. In Qingdao, a beer glass is never raised without a toast.

This serves three (frankly ingenious) purposes; beer is drunk in unison; beer isn't consumed too rapidly, since constant toasting would ruin conversation; and everyone finds ways to honor each other for the purposes of toasting. Captain Jau was particularly in favor of the latter as our eccentric host was made subject of most cheers, likewise teaching us the salutations he had learned from the many foreign guests he had cooked for. From the French "salut!" to the German "prost!" to the Turkish "serefe!" Most popular of all was homegrown "hajiu!"

Alcohol is enjoyed throughout China. Microbreweries are yet to catch on here like they have in Japan and Singapore. For now Tsingtao holds the monopoly, and Qingdao's people aren't complaining.

The Tsingtao Brewery, founded in 1903 by German settlers, confiscated by the Japanese in 1915, turned over to state ownership in 1949 and finally privatized in the early 1990s, has witnessed a colorful history. The largest stakeholder, Anheuser-Busch, recently sold majority ownership to Japanese Asahi Breweries.

Residents are the first to introduce you to their biggest export. Outside every shop is a barrel or two of Tsingtao, with a ream of clean plastic bags ready to be filled with cheap 3.5 percent beer. Tsingtao beer tastes crisp and sweet (most likely from rice mixed in to cut down on the cost of barley. It is bought by the pound and weighed to prevent gaseous volume manipulation. A pint, when sold in this method, costs around 1.5 renminbi, or 22 U.S. cents.

Beer is a way of life here and has been ever since the Germans arrived and erected tree-lined avenues, red-roofed houses and a brewery. The Germans are gone but the beer stayed. And with it, three hajiu-loving generations tell you about their happy memories.

"When I was little, buying beer was one special job I did for my dad every summer day," explained Irene Cheung over a fresh bag of beer. "I was the little girl proudly and carefully carrying the plastic bag home."

It is easier to identify Qingdao by what it is not -- smoggy, crowded Beijing, or nightlife hub Shanghai -- than what it is or hopes to be. This may be the very reason why Qingdao remains largely unvisited by the West. And while there may not be much more than good weather, food and beer to keep you content, that may just be enough to hop on the three-hour flight from Hong Kong, or the one hour 20 minute-journey from Beijing or Shanghai.

Following Olympic-based investment, more than 3,000 factories have sprung up in the airport suburbs. You can source anything from shoes to jewels to Durex condoms among the largely Korean-owned industries. If these things aren't up your street, head elsewhere; like functionally named Beer Street, Bar Street, or my personal favorite, Coffee and Tea Craft Street.

"We used to have to put on parties so that there would be material to justify an English-oriented lifestyle magazine," editor Blocher said. "Now we have trouble keeping track!"

Check out English-language newspaper Red Star, for informative listings and an insight into the growing English-speaking population that has stumbled upon and stayed in Qingdao.

Japan's nuclear-bombed cities plan joint bid for 2020 Olympic Games

On August 6 and 9, 1945 the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, were bombed by the U.S. with atomic bombs.

Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's Tomihisa Taue are the founders of the Mayors for Peace 2020 campaign, that is an effort have a global ban on nuclear weapons by 2020.

Using this campaign as a spring-board, the mayors are also planning to launch a joint-bid for the 2020 Olympics.

"The Olympics symbolize the abolition of nuclear arms and world peace, and we want to work to realize our plan to host the games," Akiba said.

Last month Akiba spoke in Mexico City and asserted that he believed that the world could indeed abolish nuclear weapons by 2020. He further added that nothing would celebrate such an abolition, than for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two cities to ever suffer from atomic strike, to host the Olympics on such a momentous occasion.

One must certainly admit that such an unfolding of events would definitely be cause for celebration, and if a nuclear weapon abolition across the globe were to take place, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would indeed be the perfect places for "icing on the cake," but in reality the whole scheme seems nothing short of utopian.

With a nuclear North Korea and Iran not far behind, attempting to accomplish a world ban on nuclear weapons is not only a utopian idea, but also seemingly naive. Though the U.S. has entered the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, along with Russia, both nations still maintain a nuclear arsenal. China as well will surely not give-up such a weapon. Pakistan and India who are bitter rivals will certainly retain their nuclear weapons as a deterrent to the other-side.

Such a list may go on forever, and to hope that a nuclear ban would take place within the next eleven years is too far fetched for the Olympic Committee to agree to allow the two cities to host the 2020 games. While we must all applaud the effort of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and as exciting as it would be for a denuclearized world to watch the Olympics in these two historic cities, the reality is that it may yet be all too far out of reach.

Public baths in Adachi cut weekend prices to combat plunge in visitors

Public baths in Adachi cut weekend prices to combat plunge in visitors

Public baths in Tokyo's Adachi Ward have lowered their weekend prices for children and accompanying adults in a bid to combat a decline in customers.

A campaign running until February lowers the admission fee for elementary school students to 100 yen on Saturdays and Sundays, down from 180 yen. The price for accompanying adults is 330 yen (down from 450 yen), while infants get in for free, instead of the regular 80 yen. There are also quizzes and prizes for younger children.

"We encourage parents and children to come and relax and soak in the baths," said the operator of one public bath participating in the campaign.

The number of public baths in Tokyo peaked in 1968, when there were over 2,600 baths. However, due to management difficulties and a lack of successors the figure has since dwindled to about 850. In Adachi Ward, which has retained a bath-going culture, there are still 53 public baths. The baths are varied, some with outdoor bathing spots and some with baths designed specifically for children, and the Adachi branch of the Tokyo Sento (public bath) Association is pouring effort into attracting families to halt the decline in users caused by the aging population and declining birth rate.

The weekend discounts are covered by a Tokyo Metropolitan Government subsidy, with children who bring stickers distributed at elementary schools entitled to discounts. In addition, people who correctly answer a quiz in the autumn edition of the quarterly publication "Sento to Ieba Adachi," distributed free at public baths and libraries, go in a draw to win puzzle games and shampoo. The deadline for entries is Dec. 6.

Satoko Funahashi, who edits "Sento to Ieba Adachi," often visits public baths with her two children.

"Our local public bath heats up well water, and it takes away your tiredness. After an autumn outing, it feels good to take a hot bath," she says.

(Mainichi Japan) October 18, 2009

Yamanote Line mountain spotters denied last glimpse of Fuji by new building

Yamanote Line mountain spotters denied last glimpse of Fuji by new building

Since this summer, passengers have no longer been able to catch a glimpse of Mt. Fuji from the JR Yamanote Line in Tokyo due to the construction of a new commercial building, leaving commuters and enthusiasts of "urban views of Mt. Fuji" heartbroken.

On winter mornings when the air was clear, the peak of Mt. Fuji was visible -- for a fleeting moment, wedged in between buildings -- if passengers were looking southwest from the train between Takadanobaba and Mejiro stations. It lasted less than a second, but captured the hearts of many as a valuable view in the middle of the urban landscape.

Hiroshi Tashiro, 59, head of FYAMAP, a forum on mountain views and maps and a teacher at University of Tsukuba Senior High School, was looking for Mt. Fuji from the train in late September when he discovered, much to his dismay, that it was now hidden. "I'm sure there were many passengers on their way to work or school who looked forward to sightings of Mt. Fuji," he said. "I'm shocked that we've lost a valuable scenic viewpoint in the Tokyo metropolitan area."

According to those affiliated with the new four-story building located approximately 100 meters from the train tracks in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward, construction was completed in August. Previously, Mt. Fuji had been visible between Harajuku and Yoyogi stations before high-rise buildings blocked the view, but the latest spot had been the last remaining spot where passengers were offered a view of Mt. Fuji from the Yamanote line.

(Mainichi Japan) October 18, 2009

Russia’s Leaders See China as Template for Ruling

October 18, 2009
News Analysis

Russia’s Leaders See China as Template for Ruling

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW — Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Communist Party, Russia’s rulers have hit upon a model for future success: the Communist Party.

Or at least, the one that reigns next door.

Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed.

United Russia’s leaders even convened a special meeting this month with senior Chinese Communist Party officials to hear firsthand how they wield power.

In truth, the Russians express no desire to return to Communism as a far-reaching Marxist-Leninist ideology, whether the Soviet version or the much attenuated one in Beijing. What they admire, it seems, is the Chinese ability to use a one-party system to keep tight control over the country while still driving significant economic growth.

It is a historical turnabout that resonates, given that the Chinese Communists were inspired by the Soviets, before the two sides had a lengthy rift.

For the Russians, what matters is the countries’ divergent paths in recent decades. They are acutely aware that even as Russia has endured many dark days in its transition to a market economy, China appears to have carried out a fairly similar shift more artfully.

The Russians also seem almost ashamed that their economy is highly dependent on oil, gas and other natural resources, as if Russia were a third world nation, while China excels at manufacturing products sought by the world.

“The accomplishments of China’s Communist Party in developing its government deserve the highest marks,” Aleksandr D. Zhukov, a deputy prime minister and senior Putin aide, declared at the meeting with Chinese officials on Oct. 9 in the border city of Suifenhe, China, northwest of Vladivostok. “The practical experience they have should be intensely studied.”

Mr. Zhukov invited President Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, to United Russia’s convention, in November in St. Petersburg.

The meeting in Suifenhe capped several months of increased contacts between the political parties. In the spring, a high-level United Russia delegation visited Beijing for several days of talks, and United Russia announced that it would open an office in Beijing for its research arm.

The fascination with the Chinese Communist Party underscores United Russia’s lack of a core philosophy. The party has functioned largely as an arm of Mr. Putin’s authority, even campaigning on the slogan “Putin’s Plan.” Lately, it has championed “Russian Conservatism,” without detailing what exactly that is.

Indeed, whether United Russia’s effort to learn from the Chinese Communist Party is anything more than an intellectual exercise is an open question.

Whatever the motivation, Russia in recent years has started moving toward the Chinese model politically and economically. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia plunged into capitalism haphazardly, selling off many industries and loosening regulation. Under Mr. Putin, the government has reversed course, seizing more control over many sectors.

Today, both countries govern with a potent centralized authority, overseeing economies with a mix of private and state industries, although the Russians have long seemed less disciplined in doing so.

Corruption is worse in Russia than China, according to global indexes, and foreign companies generally consider Russia’s investment climate less hospitable as well, in part because of less respect for property rights.

Russia has also been unable to match China in modernizing roads, airports, power plants and other infrastructure. And Russia is grappling with myriad health and social problems that have reduced the average life expectancy for men to 60. One consequence is a demographic crisis that is expected to drag down growth.

The world financial crisis accentuated comparisons between the economies, drawing attention to Moscow’s policies. In June, the World Bank projected that China’s economy would grow by 7.2 percent in 2009, while Russia’s would shrink by 7.9 percent.

Politically, Russia remains more open than China, with independent (though often co-opted) opposition parties and more freedom of speech. The most obvious contrast involves the Internet, which is censored in China but not in Russia.

Even so, Mr. Putin’s political aides have long studied how to move the political system to the kind that took root for many decades in countries like Japan and Mexico, with a de facto one-party government under a democratic guise, political analysts said. The Russians tend to gloss over the fact that in many of those countries, long-serving ruling parties have fallen.

The Kremlin’s strategy was apparent in regional elections last week, when United Russia lieutenants and government officials used strong-arm tactics to squeeze out opposition parties, according to nonpartisan monitoring organizations. United Russia won the vast majority of contests across the country.

Far behind was the Russian Communist Party, which styles itself as the successor to the Soviet one and has some popularity among older people. The Russian Communists have also sought to build ties to their Chinese brethren, but the Chinese leadership prefers to deal with Mr. Putin’s party.

The regional elections highlighted how the Russian government and United Russia have become ever more intertwined. State-run television channels offer highly favorable coverage of the party, and the courts rarely if ever rule against it. United Russia leaders openly acknowledged that they wanted to study how the Chinese maintained the correct balance between the party and government.

“We are interested in the experience of the party and government structures in China, where cooperation exists between the ruling party and the judicial, legislative and executive authorities,” Vladimir E. Matkhanov, a deputy in Russia’s Parliament, said at the Suifenhe meeting, according to a transcript.

United Russia praises the Chinese system without mentioning its repressive aspects. And the party’s stance also appears to clash with repeated declarations by Mr. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, and President Dmitri A. Medvedev that Russia needs a robust multiparty system to thrive.

The two endorsed the results of Sunday’s local elections, despite widespread reports of fraud, prompting opposition politicians to call their words hollow.

Sergei S. Mitrokhin, leader of Yabloko, a liberal, pro-Western party that was trounced, said the elections revealed the Kremlin’s true aspirations. And the China talks made them all the more clear, Mr. Mitrokhin said.

“To me, the China meeting demonstrated that United Russia wants to establish a single-party dictatorship in Russia, for all time,” he said.

Throughout recent centuries, Russia has flirted with both the West and East, its identity never quite settled, and analysts said that under Mr. Putin, the political leadership had grown scornful of the idea that the country had to embrace Western notions of democracy or governing.

That in part stems from the backlash stirred in the 1990s, after the Soviet fall, when Russia faced economic hardship and political chaos, which many Putin supporters say the West helped to cause.

Dmitri Kosyrev, a political commentator for Russia’s state news agency and author of detective novels set in Asia, said it was only natural that the Kremlin would cast its gaze to the East.

“When they discovered that there was a way to reform a formally socialist nation into something much better and more efficient, of course they would take note,” Mr. Kosyrev said. “Everyone here sees China as the model, because Russia is not the model.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Party Elder Still Jousts With China’s Censors

October 17, 2009

Party Elder Still Jousts With China’s Censors

By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
BEIJING

FOR nearly two decades, the Communist Party strove to wipe out the national memory of Zhao Ziyang, the reform-minded party secretary who opposed the use of force against pro-democracy protesters in 1989.

So when a former aide of Mr. Zhao’s, Du Daozheng, disclosed in May that he had helped secretly record Mr. Zhao’s memoir for posthumous publication, Mr. Du’s daughter refused to let him walk outside alone for fear of possible repercussions.

She need not have worried. On June 25, a top official in charge of propaganda showed up at Mr. Du’s western Beijing apartment with a reassuring message from Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Communist Party and the government. Mr. Du said he was told that, as an old friend of Mr. Zhao’s, “Zhongnanhai and party central can understand why you did this.”

Mr. Du used to be among those who delivered such judgments. Until he was ousted in 1989 with Mr. Zhao, he served as head of the government’s press and publications administration, an agency that helps enforce censors’ orders.

Now he spends his days jousting with such officials, trying to foist unmentionable topics like Mr. Zhao’s career into the public domain. Helping with Mr. Zhao’s memoir — a rare look at the party’s inner conflicts that was published this May outside China — was a particularly daring thrust.

But strategic ventures into forbidden territory are characteristic of his monthly scholarly journal, Yanhuang Chunqiu. In 2005, he published articles on Hu Yaobang, the former party leader whose death helped set off the Tiananmen protests. Infuriated authorities threatened to reduce copies of the magazine to pulp, according to Mr. Du’s daughter, Du Mingming.

After a string of journal articles last year touched on Mr. Zhao’s accomplishments, party authorities issued an internal regulation so precisely focused that it could have been named after Mr. Du. The order forbids retired government or party officials to serve as publication directors.

Party sources say Jiang Zemin, the now-retired leader who replaced Mr. Zhao, was irritated by the articles and instigated the pressure on Mr. Du to step down. Sitting in the magazine’s musty offices, Mr. Du said he dealt with the order by reshuffling titles.

“I just ignore it,” he said. “I am old enough and tough enough that if there is any pressure from the government, I can hold on here.”

MR. Du survives such skirmishes because he is 86, wily and quietly supported by certain party luminaries. He says as many as 100 former party officials back his magazine’s attempts to draw lessons from the party’s buried past and nudge it toward democratic reforms. Some current officials also sympathize with the effort, he suggests. “Nobody dares close it,” he said, lest that provoke a reaction from “old cadres.” Last year supporters promised him, “If the magazine closes, we will take to the streets,” he said.

They said: “We are old. We are in our 80s. We have heart problems. We will probably die in the streets.”

“So the conservatives don’t take any action,” Mr. Du said, “because they are afraid of that responsibility.”

Others suggest the party can afford to be tolerant. Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst of China politics, said that Mr. Du and other liberal-minded party “elders” posed no particular threat to today’s Communist Party, so slaps on the wrists sufficed.

“I admire the courage and the conviction, but the conservatives really won this battle some time ago,” he said. “I really see him as a tragic figure, still holding the flag after most of the armies have left the field.

“He is fighting a struggle against the political tenor of the times, as well as against time itself,” Mr. Moses said.

Mr. Du is not, however, fighting with himself. He sees his modest magazine, printed on newsprint-quality paper and distributed to some 100,000 subscribers for about a dollar a copy, as “the best thing he has done in his life,” his daughter said.

The struggle between truth and propaganda has been a constant theme in Mr. Du’s life. He was an early Communist Party loyalist, dropping out of middle school at age 14 to join the battle against Japanese invaders. After the Communists rose to power in 1949, he dutifully — and falsely — reported the party’s claims of record harvests and free food as a reporter for Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

But by April 1959, he could no longer reconcile the discrepancy with reality. In a 4,900-word letter to a superior, he documented widespread famine and disease in the countryside.

Within two months, his letter was turned against him during the campaign against antiparty “rightists.” He was publicly condemned 17 times — once before an auditorium filled with 6,000 people — and dismissed from his job and party post.

He escaped even worse punishment, as many did, by betraying others to his government tormentors. The four people he named “suffered greatly,” he said. One refused until his dying day to forgive him.

Mr. Du was persecuted anew during the Cultural Revolution. “It was as though I was sent to hell and back,” he wrote in his magazine in January.

Once rehabilitated, he rose quickly in the ranks of the state-run media. He held a vice ministerial position during the 1989 pro-democracy protests.

Mr. Du tried to marshal support for Mr. Zhao’s position that the crisis should be resolved peacefully. In a letter signed by some 30 other government officials, Mr. Du urged party leaders not to use force against the demonstrators, according to his daughter.

When the troops opened fire on the night of June 3, he, his wife and some friends “cried from our hearts” in his living room, Mr. Du said.

“We all shared one feeling,” he said. “The Communist Party is over.”

IT was three years before he could discuss the tragedy with Mr. Zhao, who was removed as party secretary and placed under house arrest. Mr. Du, who was also ousted, said he urged Mr. Zhao to record his version of events for history’s sake.

In the ensuing years, Mr. Du said, he filled two notebooks with Mr. Zhao’s words, then switched to a tape recorder. Four other former officials also pitched in. Mr. Du hid his copies of the tapes in his daughter’s underwear drawer and later she transported the copies to Hong Kong. After Mr. Zhao, still under house arrest, died in 2005, Bao Pu, the son of Mr. Zhao’s top aide, began transcribing and translating other copies of the recordings.

Ever the strategist, Mr. Du recommended that the memoir be published only after the 20th anniversary of the crackdown in June. But with the support of Mr. Zhao’s family, in May Mr. Bao arranged publication of a Chinese version in Hong Kong and an English version, titled “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang.”

Hong Kong bookshops have reportedly sold 100,000 copies. “I have not seen such excitement about a book in years,” said Lam Mingkei, owner of Causeway Bay Bookstore, a prominent bookseller in Hong Kong.

Mr. Du said he believed that the democratic ideals expressed in Mr. Zhao’s book and in the pages of his beloved journal would eventually take hold, though not, he predicted, under the current leaders. “If the Communist Party refuses to take political reform, then there must be some other force that rises up to carry it out,” he said.

In the meantime, he says, he will defend his journal’s role as a liberal windsock. Said his daughter: “My father knows how to fight.”

Jing Zhang contributed research from Beijing, and Hilda Wang from Hong Kong.

Russia 'illegally' on isles: Maehara

Russia 'illegally' on isles: Maehara

NEMURO, Hokkaido (Kyodo) Seiji Maehara, state minister in charge of the Northern Territories — as the government calls four Russian-held islands off Hokkaido claimed by Japan — said Saturday that Tokyo should keep demanding their return from Russia's "illegal occupation."

"Historically, the Northern Territories are an integral part of Japan. It is literally an illegal occupation (by Russia) and Japan should keep saying so," Maehara told reporters after viewing the islands from a Japan Coast Guard vessel.

Before boarding the boat, Maehara also viewed the islands — Kunashiri, Etorofu, Shikotan and the Habomai islet group — from Cape Nosappu in the city of Nemuro.

"Though faintly, you can see Kunashiri with the naked eye. As a Japanese national, I felt nostalgic," Maehara told reporters.

"Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama intends to resolve the territorial issue. Negotiations (with Russia) will not be easy but we will do our best," he added.

Maehara, also land, infrastructure, transport and tourism minister, arrived in Nemuro on Friday and met with former residents of the islands and Hokkaido Gov. Harumi Takahashi.

In the meeting, the residents called on the government to achieve an early return of the islands, which Russia refers to as the Southern Kurils. Maehara, meanwhile, revealed he intends to visit the islands after next spring.

Earlier this year, the Diet passed a bill declaring the islands to be an integral part of Japan. Then Prime Minister Taro Aso called Russia's occupation illegal, sparking protests from Moscow.

The Soviet Union seized the four islands just before the end of World War II. After occupying them, the Soviet Union declared they were part of its territories in February 1946 and all Japanese residents were forced to leave by 1949.

The dispute has prevented Japan and Russia from concluding a peace treaty to formally end the war.

The Japan Times
(C) All rights reserved

First subway line to cross Yangtze

First subway line to cross Yangtze

Created: 2009-10-18 0:47:19

CHINA'S first subway tunnel traversing the Yangtze River is expected to begin construction this month in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, local officials said yesterday.

The 3,100-meter-long tunnel will be located between the country's first bridge on the river, the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, and its first road tunnel beneath the river, they said.

The subway tunnel is expected to reduce 50 percent of the city's traffic flow across the river. It is designed to withstand a 6.0-magnitude earthquake and a flood that occurs once every 300 years, they said.

The tunnel is part of the city's No. 2 Metro line with a length of 27.98 kilometers, which is expected to be completed in 2012.

About 14.9 billion yuan (US$2.2 billion) will be invested in the construction of the Metro line, officials said.

The first road tunnel was built in Wuhan and opened for traffic last December.

Another two road tunnels under the Yangtze River in Shanghai and Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, are expected to open for traffic respectively at the end of this year and in July 2010.

The 6,300-kilometer Yangtze River, which originates in northwest China's Qinghai Province and flows through 10 provinces and municipalities before emptying into the East China Sea, is a major transport link between the west and east China. More than 100 bridges across the river are in use.

Meanwhile, construction to extend a Metro line in Beijing built for the 2008 Olympics also started on Friday.

According to the municipal transport authorities, the No. 8 line will be extended both to the north and south. The added northern section will traverse 10.7 kilometers from the south gate of the Beijing Olympic Park to the Huilongguan apartment community, outside the city's northern Fifth Ring Road.

Xinhua

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