N. KOREA: North Koreans Devastated Over Currency Changes

January 8, 2010

by Louisa Lim

A newly released North Korean bank note features an updated image of the country's founder, Kim Il Sung, portraying him as an elderly man with gray hair.  Chosun Shinbo via Yonhap/AP

Imagine waking up and being told you can only keep around $40, and the rest of your money is worthless.

That's exactly what happened to North Koreans at the beginning of December when Pyongyang pushed through currency reforms. Since then, Pyongyang's currency changes have led to public dissatisfaction, a partial government clampdown, inflation and food shortages.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans began the New Year with a massive staged rally in central Pyongyang.

"Let's implement it!" they shouted, referring to government policy, as they pumped their fists into the air. Words aside, many fear what the new year might bring.

A month ago, North Korea announced currency reforms effectively slashing two zeroes off the currency. People were told to exchange their old currency for new at a rate of 100 to one, but they could only change around $40.

Even in this tightly controlled state, that caused widespread dissatisfaction; the depth of feeling was such that there were reports of people burning money or throwing it into the river. Both acts constitute political crimes since the old currency bears pictures of North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung.

"It appears that the regime didn't anticipate the degree of pushback it would encounter on this," says Marcus Noland, a North Korea expert at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington, D.C. "It was forced to raise limits on conversion in a series of what appear to be ad hoc steps, not only raising overall limits, but providing compensatory pay raises to certain favored groups."

South Korean groups with sources in the North say subsidies of 500 won — about $15 — were given to the whole population. Then at the end of December, salaries were distributed at the same rate as if the two zeroes hadn't been knocked off the currency.

"In effect there's been a hundredfold increase in purchasing power," says Noland, but he warns this generosity could backfire. "If there are no more goods on the market, that will manifest itself in inflation."

And that's already happening. Organizations in Seoul with sources in the North are reporting that many food prices have doubled since the changes, even though the stated aim was to battle inflation.

After salaries were disbursed at the end of December, the price of goods like pork were rising by the hour. Rice prices have quintupled, according to Open Radio for North Korea, which broadcasts from Seoul. Now rice is hard to find; supplies are being stockpiled, since traders believe prices will continue to climb.

Open Radio's President Ha Tae Keung says public opinion swung behind the reforms after the salary hikes, but now worries are returning — especially given the chronic food shortages.

"People again are getting frustrated just after two weeks," Ha adds. "People's emotions and reaction, very fluctuating, changing every week."

At the beginning of January, the use of foreign currency was banned. Analysts have expressed skepticism over whether this ban will be implemented.

"The elite hold the foreign currency," says North Korea expert Noland. "This ban, if it is to be implemented — an absolutely mind-bending degree of repression or the government is going to have to cut deals with certain groups, particularly the military. It is almost inconceivable to me that the government would successfully take foreign currency away from high-ranking members of the military."

Since the currency reform, the price of the new won on the black market has plummeted, with the dollar exchange-rate 10 times higher than usual, according to Open Radio's Ha.

Foreign trade has been affected, especially with China. One Chinese seafood trader, who would only give his name as Mr. Han, says the currency reforms have made importing North Korean goods uneconomical.

"About 20 to 30 percent of Chinese companies have suspended business," Han says. "We stopped last month, so we're doing OK. Those still doing business are losing a lot of money, in the tens of thousands of dollars."

The reforms constitute an attack on North Korea's emerging market economy and those newly minted businessmen who got rich from it. They signal a return to North Korea's form of socialism.

Some scholars believe, in symbol-laden North Korea where iconography is key, the content of the new notes is highly significant. The image of North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung is updated to show him as an elderly man with gray hair, while for the first time there is a coded reference to current leader Kim Jong Il, in a picture of the log cabin where he was born at Mount Paektu, according to official North Korea mythology.

In an article, the University of Vienna's Rudiger Frank spells out the importance of these changes. He writes: "Technically, the new North Korean currency is an attempt to bring the economy back under control. But the picture of the elderly Kim Il Sung, the first-ever appearance of Kim Jong Il, and the reminder that these two leaders form a unity and that the Party is above the military also indicate that a power change in North Korea is drawing closer."

Open Radio's Ha also believes this reform is laying the groundwork for the power succession from Kim Jong Il to his son and presumptive heir Kim Jong Eun.

"The ultimate goal is to attack newly emerging powers who might oppose the Kim Jong Eun group," says Ha, "by confiscating their wealth, controlling their dollars and weakening them."

He points out that what is unprecedented about these reforms is that, for the first time, the North Korean government has shown sensitivity to public opinion.

"This currency reform is the first policy initiative to stabilize Kim Jong Il's power succession," Ha says. "So if public opinion to this policy is going bad, it might jeopardize the power succession plan."

What's not clear, however, is how Pyongyang will continue to disburse such huge salaries and feed its hungry population.

Erica Kang, from the South Korean humanitarian group Good Friends, predicts there could be more unrest and the crime rate could go up, if there are food shortages.

Even South Korea's defense minister has warned his troops that it's difficult to estimate the threats that will arise in the aftermath of the currency reform.

"The collapse scenario is getting more probable after the currency reform," predicts Ha.

Though others caution the North Korean regime has shown extraordinary resilience in the face of adversity.

View Article on NPR

CHINA: Chinese Looking in America, but Not Buying

January 8, 2010

By KEVIN BRASS

When Angel Calzadilla, a Florida real estate agent, received an e-mail a few weeks ago from a man who said he was a Chinese executive and wanted to buy a house, he suspected a scam.

“I thought it was fishy,” said Mr. Calzadilla, who is based in Fort Lauderdale, where Chinese buyers are a rarity.

But the executive was real. He hired a lawyer, transferred $750,000 into a trust account for the purchase and is now searching, with Mr. Calzadilla’s help, for a four-bedroom house in the range of $500,000 to $1 million.

Agents and industry executives around the United States are reporting similar experiences. Chinese buyers, once a novelty in many areas, are growing increasingly common, heralding what some believe — and many hope — may be an important new buying group.

Early last year, in the depths of the financial downturn, several groups of investors from mainland China toured properties around the United States, setting off a wave of media coverage. The tours were organized by companies like SouFun, a Beijing-based real estate Web site owned by Telstra, the Australian telecommunications conglomerate.

Many in the U.S. real estate industry hoped that the trips were an early indication that a wave of Chinese buyers was on its way. But, so far at least, the Chinese have mostly been what the agents call Lookie Lous — checking out properties but not buying.

“A lot of these buyers are very cautious right now,” said Kelvin Wong, owner of Resource Real Estate Services in Temple City, California, outside Los Angeles. “They are coming over and taking a look at what is going on to be prepared for when opportunity comes.”

And that will be when market conditions stabilize, according to experts like Paul Brewbaker of TZ Economics, a research and consulting company based in Honolulu.

“Trust me, there are going to be a lot more Chinese investors over here,” he said. “We’re very much in the early stages of this.”

Several factors are fueling the optimism. Thanks to China’s fast-growing economy, its population of millionaires is now the fourth largest in the world, moving past Britain in 2008, according to the 2009 Merrill Lynch-CapGemini World Wealth Report.

Prices in many parts of the United States dropped 25 percent to 35 percent last year, but it is the secure, established nature of the U.S. residential sector — especially in comparison to the wild gyrations of many Asian property markets — that is particularly attractive to Chinese investors.

“They come to the U.S. not for the huge profit, it’s for the stabilized market,” said Kenneth Li, an agent with Century 21 in Houston who deals with many Chinese buyers.

In many ways, the interest in U.S. property is part of a general economic shift. Direct investment by Chinese companies in the United States grew to $1.2 billion in 2008 from $385 million in 2002, a 220 percent increase, government data shows.

Officially, China strictly limits its citizens on the amount of money they can invest overseas, usually the equivalent of about $50,000 a year. But industry executives say there are a variety of methods for wealthy Chinese to avoid the restrictions, including overseas bank accounts and trusts.

In 2007 Chinese buyers accounted for 7.5 percent of international buyers in the United States, according to a survey by the National Association of Realtors. Although that number dropped to 5.4 percent last year, agents in California and Texas report a sharp increase in contacts from China in the same period.

Forty-one percent of the Chinese purchases of residential property in the United States last year were in California, according to the national realtors group. In the past three years, the Chinese population in the state grew by more than 80,000 to about 1.2 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Many buyers have children studying in the United States or have relatives here, said John Wu, president of the Chinese American Real Estate Professionals Association, in San Gabriel, California.

Typically, he said, the buyers are not looking for ostentatious properties, but rather for houses that can be easily rented or resold. “They really buy houses with more flexibility,” Mr. Wu said. “They understand the market here.”

The West Coast is not the only area seeing activity. In New York, for example, interest from China is “infinitely stronger now,” said Chaim Katzap, chief executive of Lion’s Property Development Group, an investment advisory firm based in New York with offices in Beijing and Shanghai.

Mr. Katzap met with several investor groups from China last year. Like other executives, he reports the interest did not translate into big deals but, “they keep calling.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

JAPAN: Kan Jolts Yen On First Day As FinMin

01.07.10, 05:43 AM EST

TOKYO -- Japan's new finance minister is wasting little time making waves, jolting the foreign exchange market Thursday by calling for a weaker yen as doubts surface about his ability to guide a recovery in the world's No. 2 economy.

In unusually explicit remarks for a Japanese finance minister, Naoto Kan vowed to work closely with the central bank to steer the currency toward an "appropriate" level around 95 yen to the dollar.

He welcomed the yen's recent retreat from the 14-year high of 84.83 to the dollar hit in November but indicated it hadn't fallen far enough. "I hope currency markets correct themselves further, weakening the yen," he said.

That sent the dollar surging to a high for the day of 92.87 yen from 92.20 yen just before the comments.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama formally installed Kan as new finance minister Thursday, replacing an experienced fiscal conservative with a popular politician known more for candor and mettle than crafting economic policy.

Kan takes over from Hirohisa Fujii, whose health problems led the 77-year-old to resign Wednesday after just four months as the top finance official.

Kan, who will retain his post as deputy prime minister, is an unlikely appointment. While the choice may lift the government's sagging public approval ratings, his background and outspoken views are already causing anxiety about Japan's fragile recovery.

The 63-year-old is a vocal advocate of slashing public works spending - a key component of Hatoyama's economic stimulus - and will instead appropriate money for social programs. Investors worry that such spending could rise, swelling Japan's already massive public debt, given Kan's opposition to Fujii's insistence on capping government bond issuance to 44 trillion yen ($475 billion) next fiscal year.

He has also been critical of the Bank of Japan, which he views as too optimistic on the economy.

A former health minister, Kan gained prominence in Japan for exposing in 1996 a government cover-up of HIV-tainted blood products that caused thousands of hemophilia patients to contract the virus that causes AIDS.

He may have credibility as a social activist, but observers wonder whether Kan is up to the task of stemming deflation and bolstering growth.

"Unlike Fujii ... Kan does not seem to have a good background on economic and fiscal policy," said Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at JP Morgan Securities Japan.

"Unless Kan shows strong leadership to organize growth strategies, involving the BOJ, Japan's economy will not be able to get out of the trap of deflation and mounting government debt."

Fujii, by contrast, was a career bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry and had previously served as its chief in 1993-94.

The role of the finance minister will be crucial to boosting the government's popularity ratings, which have tumbled since the Democrats swept into power in September. Japan's economy has been hobbling toward a weak recovery since the 2008 financial crisis, and public debt is ballooning to near 200 percent of gross domestic product.

Hatoyama himself has taken personal blows as he battles a campaign contribution scandal, and tries to shake off a reputation for indecisiveness over moving a major U.S. military base on the southwestern island of Okinawa.

The prime minister had wanted Fujii, the oldest Cabinet member, to remain in the finance post and asked him stay to help push the budget through parliament.

Fujii, who has a history of high blood pressure, spent several tough weeks late last year churning out a record 92.29 billion yen ($1 trillion) spending plan. The government is also trying to pass a 7.2 trillion yen ($78 billion) stimulus package.

The budget's fate will be Kan's first major test once the Diet convenes on Jan. 18.

"I believe we will sufficiently make it through the Diet session," Hatoyama said, expressing confidence in his new pick.

Although currency markets reacted Thursday, bond and stock markets remained relatively quiet, holding back to see what Kan actually does. In the longer-term, the new finance minister will need to tackle Japan's mountain of debt, said Kyohei Morita, chief Japan economist at Barclays ( BCS - news - people ) Capital in Tokyo.

"We hope he will work earnestly toward that goal with an understanding that there are no short cuts," Morita said in a report. "A more cautious handling of market communications would also be appreciated."

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

CHINA: Chinese Decision on Rates Seen as ‘Turning Point’

January 8, 2010

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — China’s central bank raised a key interest rate slightly Thursday for the first time in nearly five months, in what economists interpreted as the beginning of a broader move to tighten monetary policy and forestall inflation.

After breaking stride a year ago during the global economic slowdown, the Chinese economy resumed galloping growth over the summer. Government investments, real estate construction and consumer spending are all rising briskly, thanks to a surge in lending by government-controlled banks.

Even exports have begun to recover despite continued economic weakness in the European Union and the United States, China’s two biggest overseas markets.

Raising interest rates may help discourage speculative investments by Chinese companies and individuals in real estate projects and other areas of economic activity. China’s dilemma is that higher rates may also prompt overseas investors seeking higher returns to redouble their efforts to push money into China, despite the country’s stringent capital controls.

The People’s Bank of China announced Thursday that the yield from its weekly sale of three-month central bank bills had inched up to 1.3684 percent. The yield had been stuck at 1.328 percent since Aug. 13.

An increase of less than 0.05 of a percentage point might sound small, but economists said it was a harbinger of more interest rate increases to come.

They cited expectations that consumer and producer prices would rise in the months ahead, particularly compared with low price levels a year ago, when demand temporarily slumped in China as well as the rest of the world.

“It is a turning point,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist in the Hong Kong offices of Royal Bank of Scotland. “There is a convergence of events that will lead to higher rates.”

The increase in the interest rate turned mainland China’s stock markets into Asia’s worst performers Thursday. The CSI 300 index of shares on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets slumped 1.98 percent.

Air freight capacity out of mainland China and Hong Kong was almost fully booked in December, according to shippers, making it likely that China would post strong exports when it released a flood of monthly and annual economic data next week. But in interviews this week, senior corporate executives voiced a range of opinions about whether this strength would continue into the new year, or whether the surge in December represented a flurry of restocking by retailers who went into the Christmas season with meager inventories.

Victor Fung, the nonexecutive chairman of Li & Fung, a Hong Kong-based trading and supply chain management company that is one of the world’s largest, said that overseas demand had not been strong enough to sustain the strength in China's shipments seen last month. But he added that his own staff was somewhat more optimistic than he is, as are some investment bank economists.

Thursday's slight increase in interest rates could prove even more significant if it marks the start of an effort by Chinese regulators to limit bank lending. Chinese banks have not only lent heavily at home, but stepped up lending in other countries as well, taking market share from Western banks hobbled by the global financial crisis.

Top officials at the People's Bank of China concluded an annual two-day policy review on Wednesday with a lengthy statement that had particularly strong cautions against bank lending to sectors of the economy with overcapacity or excessive energy use. Chinese bank regulators also warned banks in late November to show more caution in lending and raise more capital to underpin the surge in lending they have already done; the publicly traded Bank of China is widely expected to take the lead in raising money this year.

Thursday's interest rate increase is not the first since the bottom of the economic downturn. After cutting interest rates on the same 3-month central bank bills by 2.4 percentage points in the last quarter of 2008 as the world's financial system trembled, the People's Bank nudged up interest rates by 0.363 from late June to early August last year in a series of increasingly large weekly increases.

But the central bank has been on hold ever since, watching for more evidence of the economy's health. Thursday's increase appeared to confirm that the central bank was starting to become concerned again about rising prices, economists said.

Central banks around the world have a history of taking small steps at first when they begin raising interest rates after a long period of keeping them low in response to an economic downturn. Because China does not have a well-developed bond trading market, the yields on the weekly sales of central bank bills are widely watched as a barometer of the central bank’s intentions.

The central bank sells its bills mainly to banks, which pay in renminbi that the central bank then effectively takes out of circulation, slowing growth in the country’s money supply.

Weekly sales of central bank bills are part of a process that economists describe as “sterilization” of China’s extensive intervention in currency markets.

As U.S. dollars and other foreign currencies pour into China from its trade surplus and foreign investment, the central bank prints vast sums of renminbi and issues them to buy those dollars and other currencies.

To prevent all those extra renminbi from feeding inflation, the central bank then claws back the renminbi from the market through a series of measures that include the sale of central bank bills. China also requires commercial banks to keep large reserves on deposit at the central bank, partly to keep the banks from lending too recklessly but also so that the central bank can use that money to finance further purchases of dollars and other foreign exchange.

The goal of sterilization is to keep inflation under control in China while keeping the renminbi weak. That helps make China’s exports competitive overseas and preserves jobs in China, while contributing to unemployment in countries producing rival goods.

The U.S. dollars and other currencies go into China’s foreign exchange reserves, which stood at $2.27 trillion at the end of September; monthly figures through the end of December are due for release next week. China has the biggest foreign exchange reserves of any country, by far.

Because the central bank has essentially borrowed at home to finance that accumulation of reserves, there is considerable worry in China about losses on those reserves if the value of the U.S. dollar weakens further.

Comments on Internet bulletin boards in China about possible currency losses on the foreign exchange reserves are quickly deleted by censors, a sign of officials’ sensitivity.

China’s foreign-exchange regulators have redoubled their efforts in the past two months to prevent inflows of so-called hot money — capital that moves on a short notice to any country providing better returns.

With the exception of investments that bring the transfer of scarce technologies or management expertise, China has a dwindling need for foreign capital. A domestic savings rate of close to 40 percent has made ample money available for new projects.

The central bank is already buying more than $300 billion a year of foreign currencies, mainly dollars, to keep the renminbi weak and preserve the competitiveness of Chinese exports in foreign markets. So the central bank has had little appetite to buy more foreign currencies so as to allow foreigners to invest in China’s growth while preventing the renminbi from appreciating.

Copyright 2010

N. KOREA: North Korea Started Uranium Program in 1990s, South Says

January 7, 2010

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea apparently began pursuing a uranium enrichment program in 1996 at the latest, the South Korean foreign minister said Wednesday, bolstering fears that the North’s second route to building a nuclear bomb could be well on its way..

The North’s nuclear program has long focused on a plutonium-making complex in Yongbyon, north of its capital. The country acknowledged for the first time last April that it intended to enrich uranium as well.

In June, it said its enrichment program was in an “experimental stage” while bitterly denouncing the United Nations for tightening sanctions after its nuclear test in May. In September, North Korea said its “experimental uranium enrichment” had entered a “completion phase.”

But the South Korean minister, Yu Myung-hwan, said Wednesday, “It appears that North Korea started its uranium enrichment program at least in 1996.” Speaking to the Yonhap news agency, in comments confirmed by his office, he said, “What’s clear is that the North began enriched uranium development quite early.”

Mr. Yu said many things remained unclear: “how far the program has advanced, how much enriched uranium and how many nuclear weapons they have.” He did not elaborate beyond saying that Seoul was in close consultation with Washington and other allies.

For years before North Korea officially announced the uranium program, American and South Korean officials had urged it to come clean on suspicions that it was pursuing uranium enrichment with technological help from Pakistani nuclear scientists.

North Korea said last year that it began the uranium enrichment to make fuel for nuclear power plants it hopes to build in the future. Both enriched uranium and plutonium can also be turned into fuel for atomic bombs.

In 1994, North Korea agreed to freeze and then dismantle the complex in Yongbyon. That facility, the only nuclear arms program the North has acknowledged, produced enough plutonium for at least half a dozen bombs, according to American estimates.

The 1994 deal collapsed in 2002 when North Korea rejected American demands that it respond to allegations that it was violating the accord by secretly pursuing uranium enrichment. Even after six-nation talks began in 2003 to try to produce a new agreement under which North Korea would give up its weapons program, the North tried to keep the talks focused on its Yongbyon program.

Its refusal to discuss enrichment eventually helped scuttle the six-nation talks in late 2008.

By then, North Korea had already demolished part of the Yongbyon facilities in return for Washington’s agreement to remove it from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. During most of last year, North Korea pursued confrontation, conducting a nuclear test in May and test-firing a series of ballistic missiles. Last autumn, it began sending signals for talks.

The enrichment issue has added new urgency to resuming the six-nation talks, according to experts. North Korea is believed to be months, if not years, away from restarting its plutonium-producing reactor in Yongbyon.

Mr. Yu said he expected North Korea to return to the six-nation talks. But he denounced the North’s latest demand that the United States negotiate a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War before it considers giving up its nuclear weapons.

“That’s like saying it will never give up its nuclear programs, or it is a delaying tactic” to buy time to further its nuclear programs, he said.

Mr. Yu, who has expressed doubts in the past that North Korea will give up its nuclear arms, called for continued enforcement of United Nations sanctions.

View Article in The New York Times

JAPAN: Japan’s Finance Minister Quits, Citing Poor Health

Left, Naoto Kan, successor to Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii, center, last year with Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano.  Issei Kato/Reuters

January 7, 2010

By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — Dealing another blow to the fledgling government, the Japanese finance minister resigned Wednesday, leaving Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to appoint a successor with little fiscal experience to grapple with financing an ambitious campaign agenda, a growing public debt and a fading economic recovery.

Deputy Prime Minister Naoto Kan, a founder of the governing Democratic Party and the minister in charge of economic policy and state strategy, will succeed the finance minister, Hirohisa Fujii, Mr. Hatoyama said.

Mr. Fujii, 77, cited fatigue and deteriorating health as the reasons for his resignation, which was tendered just as the government was preparing to shepherd through Parliament a record $1 trillion budget for the fiscal year that starts in April.

Mr. Kan, 63, a former activist and champion of reducing the authority of bureaucrats, is seen as having the political influence but none of the financial expertise of Mr. Fujii. A fiscal conservative and former Finance Ministry bureaucrat, Mr. Fujii was considered a valuable experienced hand in the cabinet of Mr. Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party came to power in September.

Investors saw Mr. Fujii as a reassuring check on the left-leaning government’s spending plans. In recent months he had wrangled with ministries over budget cuts as Japan struggled to restrain its public debt, which is close to twice the size of the gross domestic product.

But the Democrats also want to finance an ambitious social agenda, including payments to families with children and free public high school education. The agenda formed the cornerstone of their campaign proposals.

Some analysts attributed Mr. Fujii’s departure to a rift with the Democratic Party’s powerful secretary general, Ichiro Ozawa, who has pushed through a series of changes in the government’s fiscal policy. Last month, Mr. Ozawa publicly criticized Mr. Fujii’s budgeting process, questioning whether the finance minister was doing enough to curb the power of Japanese bureaucrats, who have maintained control of the country’s budget for decades.

It will now be up to Mr. Kan to guide the budget through Parliament, which convenes this month, and to draft additional stimulus packages that analysts expect will be necessary to sustain an economic recovery.

Mr. Kan has argued for more stimulus measures, saying that Japan faced a slide back into recession. But in recent months, he has also expressed caution against a budget so big that it could sharply increase the nation’s debt.

Mr. Hatoyama expressed confidence in Mr. Kan. “I wanted to appoint a successor who has worked most closely with the finance minister,” Mr. Hatoyama said.

Mr. Kan later said that he intended “to do the utmost as finance minister.”

Still, analysts called Mr. Fujii’s resignation a big setback for Mr. Hatoyama’s government.

“Mr. Fujii was one of Mr. Hatoyama’s most active and visible ministers,” said Yoshiaki Kobayashi, professor of Japanese politics at Keio University. “Mr. Kan is a good politician, but fiscal and economic policy is not his expertise at all.”

Mr. Fujii, suffering from exhaustion and high blood pressure, checked into a hospital on Dec. 28, and had been commuting to work from there.

Mr. Hatoyama had at first urged Mr. Fujii to remain in his post to present the coming fiscal year’s budget to Parliament. But the prime minister said late Wednesday that Mr. Fujii had tendered his resignation and that the government had no choice but to accept it.

Public approval ratings for Mr. Hatoyama’s government have slid from postelection highs of more than 70 percent to less than 50 percent in recent polls.

Mr. Kan will be the sixth Japanese finance minister since August 2008.

View Article in The New York Times

EAST ASIA: Top Ten World Stories to Watch in 2010

Posted on January 4th, 2010

Nobody really knows what will happen in 2010, although Larry Sabato’s Jeanne Dixon-inspired post at Politico comes pretty close. But there are ten stories that will shape the world this year — for better or for worse. Other crises may erupt (I have not, for example, included the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians on the list), but these ten stories as they develop are most likely going to be the events that determine what kind of year 2010 will be.

10. The New Japan

The Democratic Party of Japan government under Prime Minister Yuko Hatoyama is the first strong non-LDP government in Japan since the MacArthur era. It came to office promising dramatic changes in everything from Japan’s bureaucratically-dominated governing system to U.S.-Japan relations–while getting the economy back on track. Any one of these would be a tough job, and with restive coalition partners and many inexperienced politicians tasting real power for the first time, the government has hit some obstacles. Japan is still the world’s second largest economy and despite its pacifist constitution it remains a top military spender. The success or the failure of the DPJ over the next year may not be as dramatic as political stories in other parts of the world–but it matters a lot. The relationship between the United States and Japan has been the cornerstone of stability in Asia for more than fifty years; let’s see what happens now.


9. The EU After Lisbon

It took almost as long for the EU to get its new non-constitution ratifiied as it took the United States to get from the Declaration of Independence to our own first constitutional president in 1789. Now the Treaty of Lisbon has gone into effect, providing for a unified European foreign service headed by a kind of EU foreign minister and a new EU president (or chair, depending on how the relevant articles are translated into English). Now the Europeans and the rest of us will begin to find out if all this work has made any difference. So far, the signs are not good; European diplomacy was completely ineffective at the Copenhagen summit on climate change–an issue which Europe thought that it owned. Europe now faces some of the most important and frightening issues in its history. Greece today and potentially Spain, Italy and Ireland in the not-so-distant future might threaten the stability of the common European currency. Turkey is increasingly dissatisfied with European resistance to its bid to join the Union. Within Europe, problems with immigrants continue to grow and beyond it events in the Arab world, Russia and Iran could plunge it into crises over which it has little control. In 2010 we will see whether, post-Lisbon, Europe is getting its act together or whether it continues to punch well below its weight in world affairs.


8. Turkey in Transition

Turkey may be the only European country whose geopolitical importance has dramatically grown since the end of the Cold War. In relations between the West and the world of Islam, Turkey can play a crucial mediating role–or it can help bring on the ‘clash of civilizations’ most of us still hope to avoid. Torn between secular, religious and liberal politics, Turkey is undergoing culture wars as bitter as, if not more than, anything we have in the US. Turkish policy and politics make a lot of difference in Iran, Iraq and the Caucasus. Turkey can help or hurt efforts to promote peace between Israel and its neighbors; Turkey has a significant role to play in the changing relationship between Russia and the West. Keep your eyes on Turkey; what happens here will affect a range of important world issues.

7. The Crisis in Global Governance

One lesson from the Copenhagen conference is that the system of global governance is melting down faster than an iceberg in Ecuador. It isn’t just the climate conference; the global trade system is in deep disarray. The WTO has been struggling since the Clinton administration to produce a new global trade agreement: no end is in view. The old institutions and clubs (like NATO and the G-7) don’t have the clout to make their decisions stick; the new ones (like the G-20) still don’t work very well. Banking regulation, public health, immigration, the environment, trade: there are more and more problems that can only be properly addressed by countries working together, and many of the key institutions are working less and less well. Will the world make progress on developing new frameworks for cooperative action, or at least find a way to work around the institutional problems that have blocked progress in the past?


6. The U.S. and China

Whether you think economically, geopolitically or militarily, the U.S.-China relationship will shape the kind of year we all have in 2010. The complicated economic interdependence of these major world players is so unprecedented and is changing so rapidly that neither side quite understands how it works. The very different historical experiences, systems of government and cultural frameworks of the two countries make it hard for them to understand and therefore to trust one another.

Fortunately, they share a set of extremely important common interests and so far this has helped keep relations on track. That relationship is sure to be tested in 2010; China is becoming more assertive as it drinks the heady wine of economic success. Japan went through a similar phase before its bubble burst a generation ago; this year we will watch both the United States and China struggle with a relationship that neither really wants but that neither can do without. For now.

5. The Balance of Power in Asia

It’s been a while since non-specialists spent much time thinking about the balance of power in key geopolitical regions of the world. For the last twenty years most people have thought about questions like ‘world order’ and the rise of democracy. The balance of power is coming back in 2010, though hopefully not with a bang. As China, India, Japan and the United States look warily at each other, it’s clear that no single power can hope to dominate East and South Asia right now. But what the Asian pecking order will be, and how it will be determined, are still up for grabs. Will Japan and India form a partnership with backing from the United States? Will Japan seek to deepen ties with China–even as Chinese-Indian relations become more strained? Changing relations among the Big Four will lead to responses from Asia’s many important second level powers: Vietnam, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and so on. And of course we can always count on North Korea to do something annoying. Americans who take foreign news seriously are going to have to learn to follow this story; it will likely be on the top ten list again next year.


4. Pakistan

The world’s unhappiest and least stable nuclear state will stay at the forefront again this year. The Pakistani military is deeply committed to a profoundly unrealistic conception of the country’s interests and identity. Its leading civilian politicians are both incompetent and corrupt. Failures of governance have left much of the country poorly educated and poorly positioned to take advantage of the kind of economic opportunities that are leading its neighbor and rival India to new heights of power and prestige. Deep seated regional antagonisms periodically threaten the country’s ability to hold together. Nobody in Pakistan or outside of it seems to have the least idea about what to do. The Pakistanis are surprisingly good at managing things day by day, but it’s hard to ignore the increasing evidence that this country, which deserves much better, is trapped in a dead end of history. The decline of Pakistan, its effects on Pakistan’s neighborhood and on US policy, will likely continue to be a major concern all year long.


3. America at War

The United States is fighting two shooting wars in Asia and, as we were all unhappily reminded on December 25, fighting a shadowy conflict with a collection of ugly religious nutcases who will stop at nothing to murder U.S. civilians whenever they can. How the United States navigates the military challenges of its wars together with the political challenges at home and abroad will be one of the top stories of 2010. If things go well, by the end of the year we will see the U.S. headed out of an increasingly stabilized and recovering Iraq with at least the beginnings of some real progress in Afghanistan. We will also see progress against Al-Qaeda not only in the hills of the AfPak border regions but more broadly in the accelerated disruption of its international networks and in the continued hardening of Islamic opinion against this fanatical cult.

2. The Global Economy

2010 will determine whether the world dodged the bullet of the great 2008-2009 financial crisis. In a best case scenario, the recovery that started in 2009 will accelerate and by the end of the year most if not all of the world’s major economies will be looking at faster growth rates and better fiscal projections than anyone now expects. Unemployment will be falling even as fiscal and monetary stimulus is eased back and stock markets will begin to close in on their all time highs in the United States. Or not. Either way, all eyes will be riveted on economic performance this year; without continuing recovery all the other problems just get worse.

1. Iran and the World

By the end of 2010 we should now more about where this one is headed. Domestically, either the regime marginalizes or crushes the opposition, or its power and legitimacy are permanently impaired. Internationally, this will also be a year of decision. Some observers predict Israeli strikes as early as the spring. Others are less alarmist. One thing to remember: Israeli airstrikes against Iran could well lead to Iranian retaliation against American targets and not just Israeli ones in the region. Iranian attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf, or Iranian-backed terrorism elsewhere would put the Obama administration in a nasty corner. Returning Iranian fire would involve the United States in a potentially open-ended conflict; failing to return fire would be deeply unpopular in the United States.

Wild Cards to Watch For:

•King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the widely-revered King of Thailand, celebrated his 83rd birthday on December 5, and his health has been poor. Since World War II, the sagacious monarch has helped stabilize Thai politics and served as the focus of national identity. Thailand today is experiencing its most serious and complicated political crisis since the present King ascended the throne in 1946; it is not clear that anyone else in the royal family has the prestige and the experience to step into his shoes. The king’s departure from the political scene could set off destabilizing unrest that could worsen Thailand’s economic problems, strand tens of thousands of foreign tourists, and in a worst case scenario could pit China and the United States against one another with each side backing different Thai factions in what could become both a bloody and strategically important contest.

•The economy of Cuba continues on a downward trend. Although the island’s government has managed the transition from Fidel to Raul very smoothly, all is not well. The Cuban economy is propped up by subsidies from the mercurial and viscerally anti-Yanqui Hugo Chavez; the political strings attached to this support helped ensure that Cuba could not respond positively to the Obama administration’s attempts to ‘reset’ the relationship. The most likely outlook in 2010 is for more of the same, but the historically volatile people of this tempestuous island could surprise us all, and serious unrest in Cuba would present the Obama administration (and the rest of the region) with some difficult problems.

•Russia remains an angry, dissatisfied presence on the international scene. The potential for violence in its Islamic borderlands and among its unstable neighbors remains high. Russia might well move quickly and surprisingly in response to perceived opportunities or threats in its region; remember its 2008 war with Georgia.

JAPAN: Japan Probes 1960s Nuclear Agreements With U.S.

OCTOBER 23, 2009

By YUKA HAYASHI

TOKYO -- U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates cautioned Japan this week against letting a fact-finding mission into decades-old secret nuclear-weapons agreements affect relations between the two countries, according to an official familiar with the matter.

In a meeting with Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa on Wednesday, Mr. Gates said Japan also should avoid letting the probe hurt the U.S.'s antinuclear-proliferation efforts, the official said. Mr. Kitazawa said the government would handle confidential information sensitively, said the official.

Japan, the only nation that has endured nuclear attacks, forbids making, possessing and storing nuclear weapons on its soil. But under an understanding reached in the early 1960s, Japan agreed to look the other way when nuclear-armed U.S. ships used Japanese ports. A 1969 agreement allowed nuclear weapons to be stationed in emergency cases on U.S. bases on the island of Okinawa, after it was returned to Japanese control in 1972.

Many elements of the agreements have been disclosed previously. Both governments say the agreements no longer have teeth because nuclear-armed U.S. vessels no longer stop in Japan.

But Japan's new government, now controlled by the Democratic Party of Japan after August elections, has launched a fact-finding investigation to make the agreements public and show how they were kept secret.

"In the past, prime ministers and foreign ministers of this country repeatedly denied the existence of the secret agreements and that eroded the public's trust in the government's foreign policy," said Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada.

Political analysts say the investigation is a largely symbolic move to show a change from governments run by the Liberal Democratic Party, which dominated Japanese politics for more than half a century, until last month.

"The DPJ wants to send a message to people that they have a new government with a different political style," said Norihiko Narita, president of Surugadai University and an informal political adviser to the DPJ.

The LDP said some secrecy was necessary. "Full disclosure of information on diplomatic negotiations doesn't necessarily guarantee the protection of national interest," the party's Policy Research Council said in a statement. "In conducting foreign policy, we always made our national interest and the well-being of our citizens the top priority, and disclosed what we could."

The investigation comes as the DPJ reviews Japan's overall foreign policy with a goal of giving Tokyo an equal role in its close bilateral ties with the U.S. Some experts say the probe seeks to discredit Japanese officials who had worked closely with Washington.

U.S. officials play down the potential impact of the investigation, saying the agreements are now out in the open and it is a domestic matter. "It is up to the Japanese government how they want to explore this," said Kurt Campbell, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs.

The investigation has created a buzz in Japan, where the secret agreements were long discussed but always officially denied. "I am very much looking forward to the DPJ showing us what we couldn't see before," said Masaaki Ota, a 42-year-old Tokyo flower-shop owner who supports the DPJ.

While the agreements have been something of an open secret in Japan, U.S. government documents concerning them have been gradually declassified for years. After the DPJ began the fact-finding mission, George Washington University Professor Robert Wampler posted online a package of relevant documents from university archives.

One 1969 memorandum by Jeanne Davis of the National Security Council to members of the Nixon administration discusses nuclear-weapons policy in Okinawa after the handover back to Japan. One option: "Japn [sic] now acquiesces in transit by naval vessels armed with nuclear weapons. This right would extend automatically to Okinawa. (This is sensitive and closely held information)."

Another 1969 memo, by U.S. Ambassador to Japan Alexis Johnson, describes an exchange with Japanese Foreign Minister Kiichi Aichi regarding the deployment and storage of nuclear weapons in Okinawa. "He said that [then Prime Minister Eisaku] Sato and we were, in event of renewal of hostilities in Korea, absolutely determined to implement this secret understanding and give full support to our actions in Korea," Ambassador Johnson quoted the foreign minister as saying.

Write to Yuka Hayashi at yuka.hayashi@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

JAPAN: Worries Mount Over Japanese Minister’s Health

Japan's finance minister, Hirohisa Fujii, left, with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama on Tuesday. Jiji Press, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

January 6, 2010

By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — Japan’s new government braced for another setback Tuesday after reports that its ailing 77-year-old finance minister was pressing to resign, although it appeared that the prime minister might try to persuade him to remain in his job. The news comes at a difficult time — when the government, already weakened by a series of policy blunders and scandals, is attempting the delicate task of stimulating an economy already burdened with enormous debt.

The minister, Hirohisa Fujii, a fiscal conservative trusted by investors, is considered one of the few experienced hands in the cabinet of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party swept to power in September.

Mr. Fujii, who had said he was suffering from exhaustion and high blood pressure, announced early on Tuesday that he was awaiting doctors’ advice on whether he should stay in office.

Early Wednesday, several news agencies reported that Mr. Fujii had decided he wanted to resign, citing unnamed lawmakers from the governing party. But Mr. Hatoyama said he hoped that Mr. Fujii would remain in his post to see the coming fiscal year’s budget through Parliament. He added, however, that he would also respect medical recommendations on the finance minister’s health.

Officials at the Finance Ministry declined to comment.

Mr. Fujii, a veteran bureaucrat turned politician, has been seen by investors as a reassuring check on the left-leaning government’s spending plans. In recent months he has wrangled with ministries over budget cuts as Japan struggles to rein in its runaway public debt, close to twice the size of the country’s economy.

He has repeatedly insisted that the government stick to a $477 billion cap on new bond issuance for the fiscal year starting in April.

Mr. Fujii checked into a hospital Dec. 28 and has commuted to work from the hospital since. He told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday that he had discussed his health with Mr. Hatoyama.

Japanese news agencies later said that Mr. Fujii ultimately told the prime minister that he did not feel well enough to face long days of questioning in Parliament this month over next year’s record $1 trillion budget, a major challenge for Mr. Hatoyama’s government.

The government fears that the economy, which has been struggling for years, could slide back into recession.

Mr. Fujii’s deputies, Yoshihiko Noda and Naoki Minezaki, are among those who have been mentioned as possible successors.

Public approval ratings for Mr. Hatoyama’s government have slid from postelection highs of more than 70 percent to less than 50 percent in recent polls. The drop comes as negotiations over the relocation of an American military base in Japan have stalled and amid financing scandals linked to the prime minister and his party’s secretary general.

Mr. Fujii said last year that he intended to retire, but he stayed on after the Democratic Party victory, which ended a half century of almost uninterrupted single-party rule in Japan.

View Article in The New York Times

S. KOREA: South Korea Confronts Open Secret of Abortion

A group of doctors held a news conference in Seoul to ask “forgiveness” for having performed illegal abortions.  Choe Sang-Hun/International Herald Tribune

January 6, 2010

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — Displaying images of fetuses on her computer screen, Dr. Choi Anna described what happens to them during an abortion. For years, she said, she washed her hands in contrition after each one she performed.

Her colleague Dr. Shim Sang-duk said that until it halted the practice in September, their Ion Women’s Clinic in Seoul did 30 abortions a month, twice the number of babies delivered there. Nearly all were illegal.

“We sold our soul for money,” Dr. Choi said. “Abortion was an easy way to make money.”

In a country where abortion is both widespread and, with few exceptions, against the law, Dr. Choi and Dr. Shim are hoping to force South Korea’s first serious public discussion of the ethics of the procedure. In November, they and dozens of other obstetricians held a news conference to ask for “forgiveness” for having performed illegal abortions.

The group they formed, Gynob, has called on other doctors to declare whether they have performed illegal abortions. In December, they set up another organization, Pro-Life Doctors, which tries to discourage women from having abortions and runs a hot line to report clinics that perform them illegally. This month, they plan to begin reporting practitioners of such abortions to the police.

Gynob’s morality-based campaign is unusual for South Korea, where abortion carries little of the emotional or religious significance that it does in many Western countries. But it is gaining attention here in no small part because it is coinciding with a very public reassessment of abortion by the government, which is looking for ways to reverse a decline in South Korea’s birthrate.

Until now, abortion had never really become a hot issue here, said Hahm In-hee, a professor of family sociology at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “The society considers it a family issue, and there is a strong taboo against discussing a family matter in public,” she said.

For its part, Gynob is focusing on highlighting the hypocrisy of having a law that is almost never enforced. The group’s goal is not to resolve this by liberalizing the law but by ending abortions altogether.

Gynob has support from Christian activists, but the group says that its motivations are not religious and that it has non-Christian members. And while some feminists have advocated for a woman’s right to have an abortion and Roman Catholics have stated their opposition to the procedure, those efforts have attracted little public attention. Abortion has yet to emerge as a political campaign issue here.

The country’s Mother and Child Health Law permits abortions only when the mother’s health is in serious danger, or in cases of rape, incest or severe hereditary disorders. It is never legal after the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Based on insurance data and a government-sponsored study, academic researchers have concluded that those exceptions applied to only about 4 percent of an estimated 340,000 abortions performed in 2005. But that year, only one case of illegal abortion — which, on paper, is punishable by up to a year in prison for the woman and two for the doctor — went to court, according to data that prosecutors submitted to Parliament in October.

For decades, the South Korean government tended to look the other way, seeing a high birthrate as an impediment to economic growth. In the 1970s and 1980s, families with more than two children were denounced as unpatriotic, with official posters in South Korean villages driving the point home. Until the early 1990s, men could be exempted from mandatory army reserve duty if they had vasectomies.

Now, the government has concluded that this policy was too successful.

South Korea’s fertility rate, which stood at 4.5 children per woman in the 1970s, had fallen to 1.19 children by 2008, one of the lowest rates in the world. The government fears that the recent financial downturn may have depressed it further, and that the country’s rapidly aging population will undercut the economy’s viability.

In November, President Lee Myung-bak called for “bold” steps to increase the nation’s birthrate.

“Even if we don’t intend to hold anyone accountable for all those illegal abortions in the past, we must crack down on them from now on,” the minister for health, welfare and family affairs, Jeon Jae-hee, said.

But Ms. Jeon added that any crackdown should be coupled with an increase in medical fees for all doctors. The government cap on payments for medical services is thought to have encouraged doctors to perform off-the-books, and potentially far more lucrative, services like illegal abortions.

With fewer women having babies and the government holding down medical fees, many obstetrics clinics are struggling. Some obstetricians have switched to more lucrative skin care and obesity clinics. To those who remain, abortion — which usually costs about $340 and is paid for in cash up front because it is not covered by insurance — has become “a source of income we find really difficult to give up,” said Dr. Kang Byong-hee, an obstetrician in Paju, north of Seoul.

In addition to government policy and the economics of health care, social factors have contributed to the abortion rate. A bias for boys and against the disabled led to the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses or those with physiological defects, said Choi Sung-jae, a professor of social welfare at Seoul National University. A stigma against unmarried mothers, women’s increasing participation in the work force and the high cost of education are also seen as contributing to the trend.

Dr. Choi, of the Ion Women’s Clinic, said: “We see a tendency to have one perfect child and abort the rest. We had women demanding an abortion simply because they had taken cold medicine or drunk too much while pregnant.”

Gynob’s anti-abortion campaign is meeting resistance, notably from other doctors.

“We credit them for bringing a widespread but hushed-up social anomaly to the surface, but we can’t go along with their radical tactics,” said Baik Eun-jeong, an obstetrician who runs a clinic in Seoul’s upscale Kangnam district and speaks for the Korean Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

The association, which claims 4,000 members, says that a sudden crackdown that does not address the causes of abortion will only cause greater problems.

“More women will now go abroad for abortion,” Dr. Baik said. “Illegal abortions will go deeper underground, causing more medical accidents. There will be more abandoned infants.”

Meanwhile, the government has begun putting out a new message in public service announcements and posters in subways: having more babies is more patriotic. “With abortion, you are aborting the future,” says one such notice.

The latest government budget calls for increased cash bonuses for families with more than two children as well as greater financial aid for single mothers in need and vouchers for couples seeking help at fertility clinics.

All these voices are fueling a broader public discussion of abortion as Parliament deliberates about revising the Mother and Child Health Law. In November, President Lee said, “This is the time to start the debate.”

View Article in The New York Times

CHINA: China Aims To Ride High-Speed Trains Into Future

January 3, 2010

Workers are putting the finishing touches on a French-designed, glass-and-steel train station on the fringes of Wuhan, a major metropolis on the middle reaches of the Yangtze River in China.

Inside, the mostly middle-class passengers line up to board the high-speed train. It takes just three hours to cover the more than 600 miles to Guangzhou, China's third-largest city, in the heart of the industrialized Pearl River Delta. That's 10 hours less than the conventional train takes.

While the United States has allocated $13 billion for the construction of high-speed rail over the next five years, China plans to spend $300 billion in the next decade to build the world's most extensive and advanced high-speed rail network.

Luxury At 220 Miles An Hour

In the first-class section of the train to Guangzhou, where tickets cost upwards of $100 — almost double the price of second-class seats — real estate company manager Yang Tao and his wife have swiveled the seats in front of them around and put their feet up. He says he's willing to pay extra for a comfortable ride.

"My wife is afraid of flying," he says with a chuckle. "Taking this train is more convenient than going to the airport, with all the security checks. The flights are often delayed and the airlines' attitude is arrogant."

Onboard video screens show off the train's advanced features. In the dining car, passengers eat roast duck gizzards and spicy noodles and watch the terraced fields and factory towns of South China slip past their windows at speeds averaging around 220 mph.

By 2012, China plans to have almost three dozen high-speed rail lines crisscrossing the country. Nearly 130,000 workers are now building the Beijing-to-Shanghai line, which at $32 billion will be China's most expensive construction project ever. The frenzy of construction is at the heart of China's massive fiscal stimulus to revive the economy.

Since entering service on Dec. 26, the new train between Wuhan and Guangzhou has forced airlines to reduce ticket prices on that route. Graduate student Grace Huang says it is completely different from the lumbering, claustrophobic boxcars Chinese train travelers are accustomed to.

"This train is a big improvement," she declares. "It's comfortable and spacious, not crowded like regular trains. Of course, there's nothing we can do about that — China just has too many people."

A Greener Option?

Critics argue that the bullet trains are overkill, and that what China really needs is affordable transportation for the masses. Xie Weida, a railway expert at Shanghai's Tongji University, disagrees.

"High-speed rail can ease our transportation bottlenecks," he says. "Migrant workers may not require high-speed trains, but if some passengers take the high-speed trains, that should relieve pressure on the ordinary ones."

Of course, that scenario will only work if the number of regular trains stays the same or increases.

China's leaders say their country will not follow the West's path of development — sacrificing the environment in order to industrialize. China's investment in high-speed rail is a part of this strategy, says Xie Weida.

"To solve the problem of public transportation in such a vast country," he argues, "rail transport is the only way to go. If we rely on airplanes and automobiles like the U.S., neither China nor the world will be able to handle such energy consumption."

In Guangzhou, passengers exit the train and board buses and taxis for the city center, to which the railway will later be extended.

For some Chinese, the high-speed trains have already begun to shorten the distances between cities in their minds. Some observers predict the fast new trains will have other effects on Chinese society, such as stitching together more closely China's patchwork of regional markets, dialects and cultures.

CHINA: Shenzhen Travel: Finding Culture in the New China

In part one of Finding Culture in New China, Sarika Chawla reported on her adventures in Guangzhou. In part two, she reports on how she found the unexpected in the bustling metropolis of Shenzhen.

Now, here’s a surprising fact: the vast majority of Shenzhen residents are under 30 years old.

As a result, you’re unlikely to find elderly folk waxing poetic about old Shenzhen, or generations-old restaurants with grandma standing behind the stove.

Did razing an entire village and replacing it with an instant city also erase the “authentic” experiences that American travelers seek?

Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was an unremarkable fishing village; today it is the thriving financial and industrial hub of South China. Due to its proximity to Hong Kong, Shenzhen was singled out as the first Special Economic Zone and established as a city in 1979.

Today, it’s the biggest city in China when grouped with Hong Kong, and perhaps the richest in the country. Getting here is as easy as a short ferry or train ride from Hong Kong, or by train or road from Guangzhou.

Note that even though it’s also a part of the Guangdong province, the dominant dialect is Mandarin, not Cantonese, since most residents come from other parts of China.

In terms of urbanization, Shenzhen much further along than Guangzhou and a very carefully planned city. There is a surprising amount of green space and tree-lined streets, along with sleek and sophisticated bars and restaurants, and cultural offerings such concert halls, art galleries, museums, and book shops. While sipping evening cocktails poolside at the Ritz-Carlton or Shangri-La hotel, surrounded by imposing skyscrapers, it’s hard to distinguish this city from any number of sparkling metropolises.

But it’s the unexpected that really sets this city apart.

The first thing you might notice about Shenzhen is the proliferation of oddball theme parks. According to the locals, after China opened itself to the world in the 1970s, Chinese officials were so impressed by Disney and Six Flags-type entertainment that they considered it a necessary part of development.

As a result, theme parks include: Splendid China, which showcases miniatures of China’s famous sites and historical figures; the Chinese Folk Culture Park, which features villages of cultural performances, parades and artworks; Windows of the World, where visitors can check out replicas of the world’s greatest attractions—from the Eiffel Tower to Angkor Wat to the Sydney Opera House—as well as mind-blowing theatrical spectacles that put Vegas to shame; and Happy Valley, which is the closest experience to Disney you’ll get (apart from Hong Kong Disney and Beijing’s Shijingshan Amusement Park).

These parks are about as authentic to Chinese culture as Disney is to Anytown USA, but they are local institutions that shouldn’t be missed. If you’ve only got time for one experience, make it Windows of the World and cap the evening with a show and fireworks display.

A bit off the beaten path from Shenzhen is another unexpected gem that shouldn’t be missed. Dafen Oil Painting Village is an example in irony when talking about authenticity. Hundreds of artists have set up shop here and can copy virtually any painting you desire, even from a photo, and ship it to you.

Raphaelite cherubs? Chairman Mao? Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan? Your grandchildren? It’s all there.

However, if getting a cheap knockoff isn’t your style, Dafen is also home to dozens of original painters producing top-quality—and a good amount of mediocre—art.

Although the village has been remodeled over the years, it’s a refreshing throwback with squat buildings versus towering skyscrapers, and charming courtyards where visitors can sit down for tea.

Finally, there is a side of China that the tourists don’t always get to experience—Sunday in the park.

In Shenzhen, Lianhua Mountain Park (Lotus Mountain) is a sprawling, green oasis in the middle of the city. On Sunday morning, crowds gather to practice … everything.

Down one path a group of pajama-clad locals twist and bend in elegant tai chi moves. On another patch of grass parents and kids run along hoisting kites in the air.

But that’s the expected.

The unexpected is discovering Shenzhen’s middle-aged and elderly population in the form of embracing couples rehearsing ballroom dancing in the park, while somewhere down the lane, peels ring out from a session of laughter therapy.

Elsewhere, a collection of singers and musicians, led by an enthusiastic conductor, heartily belts out Chinese songs—and a special rendition of “Red River Valley” for their “foreign friends.”

And, my favorite of all, a group of hip-swiveling, arm-waving women belly dancing their way through Middle Eastern and Bollywood tunes, who beam when we join in to share the joy.

Dancing in the heart of Shenzhen, I felt as if I had discovered the heart of China.

Text and photos by Sarika Chawla for PeterGreenberg.com. Alan Greenspan photo by Zach Everson.

CHINA: Guide to Food in Beijing

Whether you’re headed to China for the Olympics or beyond, one thing is for sure … “authentic” Chinese food is a world away from the stuff you probably get at the corner restaurant.

In China, there is no such thing as chop suey.

This is the real deal …

“Last month, I went to a noodle shop in Shanghai,” reported Erik Wolf, president of the International Culinary Tourism Association. “My friend told me to go into the kitchen. Though I was convinced that it was a ploy to get me in trouble with local health authorities, I went into the crowded and very hot kitchen.

A man took a ball of dough, pounded it a few times and began pulling it apart with his bare hands. The noodle-making process took about five minutes. When he was done, the noodles went into the steaming water to cook. A couple minutes later, I had a very tasty plate of home-cooked noodles with vegetables in sauce.”

Another lesson Wolf learned on the road: Watch out for those pot stickers!

“You cannot imagine how delighted I was to see pot stickers—lots of them—cooking on the streets. I absconded back to my hotel with four amazingly authentic Chinese pot stickers (costing all of about 40 cents). Ouch! They were incredibly hot, and watch out! The juice oozed down the front of my shirt. You think I would have learned after the first one to be careful, but oh no. Nothing a little laundry detergent can’t fix, right?”

Craving a familiar dish? Ask for gung bao ji ding, aka “Kung Pao chicken done the right way,” according to Wolf. Don’t ask for dim sum in Beijing—it’s a Cantonese thing.

But do ask for baozi, steamed dumplings that are usually available for breakfast in most establishments. And for an unusual dessert experience, try ba si xiang jiao—warm battered banana with sweet syrup. Take a piece and dip into the water provided, watch it solidify, and then eat.

With more than 30,000 restaurants in the metropolitan area, Beijing is an ideal but often overwhelming destination for the culinary adventurer. Pack along some of these handy tips:

FOR THE MORE ADVENTUROUS

Roast duck (sometimes served complete with head, wings and feet)
Raw sea urchin
Donkey meat stew
Duck bone soup
Braised sea cucumber
Stinky tofu (only the authentic versions are truly stinky)
Braised chicken Feet
Fat head fish soup

DO AS THE LOCALS DO AND EAT ON THE STREET

Street vendors offer good food, great value and a chance to mingle with local patrons. Try sticky fruit on bamboo skewers and Xinjiang lamb skewers. Be sure to try these street vendors as you meander Beijing’s avenues and alleys:

Gui Street, near Dongzhimennei Dajie in the Dongcheng District, is the largest and most famous food street in Beijing. Here you will find seafood specialties such as spicy lobster, spicy crab, pepper and chili prawns, and poached fish in pungent sauce.

Wangfujing Snack Street, south of Haoyou Department Store, is near Wangfujing Business Street in the Dongcheng District. Red lanterns light the street at night. If you’re really adventurous, sample the scorpion kebabs. Snack on crossing bridge rice noodles, smelled bean curd, sticky fruit on bamboo skewers and Xinjiang lamb skewers. The Uyghur people from Xinjiang, China’s most western province, often have portable barbecues on which they cook and sell their offerings. If you can’t find them on the street, look for Arabic words written on any restaurant sign and you will be at a Xinjiang restaurant.

Donghuamen Market, north of Donganmen Street in the Dongcheng District, offers an ambiance of beautiful red lamps at nighttime and smells of barbecued meats and vegetables, a true feast for the senses. Try stretched noodles, fish ball soup, smelly bean curds, muttons, prawns, skewered and grilled silkworms, boiled dumplings and caramelized fruits on sticks.

Longfusi Snack Street, north of Dongsi Longfu Mansion in the Dongcheng District, is the place to try soymilk, fried dough rings, sausage or fried squid. Sweetened baked wheaten cake is a traditional treat here.

Laitai Food Street, located across from Lady’s Street, is the newest food street in the city. Here you can sample foods from different regions and cultures: Cantonese, Sichuan, Japanese, Korean, Turkey, and Thai.

Chao Yang district near the Olympic Village is popular with business people and with Westerners (not a localist destination, just an ex-pat area that does have good street food).

CAN’T-MISS CULINARY ATTRACTIONS

Guo Li Zheng Restaurant is famous for its animal penis recipes.

Fang Shen Imperial Restaurant serves Court Cuisine, based upon 600+ year old recipes favored by China’s former emperors in the Ming and King dynasties. This is a truly “imperial” dining experience, with the option for an eight, 10, 12 or 36(!)-course dinner.

LAN is one of the hottest, trendiest spots in Beijing, complete with Philippe Stark decor and 35 private dining rooms.

Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant, founded in 1864, is famous for its namesake dish.

CULTURAL TIPS ON DINING IN BEIJING

•Don’t expect molten chocolate cake or pie for dessert. Fruit, particularly watermelon or sometimes oranges, is normally offered.

•Vegetarians beware. Many vegetable dishes contain meat or meat sauces.

•Never stand your chopsticks straight up in your bowl of rice; it is an offensive gesture.

•Don’t be offended by locals slurping soup. They’re just enjoying themselves.

•MSG (wei jing) is alive and well. If you have an allergy, plan accordingly.

•There is no such thing as smoke-free eating in China. If you are allergic to cigarette smoke, consider eating outside if possible.

•Servers often stand next to you until you order. Don’t be offended, it is just the custom.

•Locals will often spit out or drop food onto the table, which is not considered rude.

•Eating out is a way to bring friends together, and most Chinese don’t go to bars. Alcohol is only consumed with meals. As such, you can usually find a couple of tables of rowdy people playing drinking games in restaurants.

•You will often see fish, shrimp and other seafood in a pond or fish tank when you enter a restaurant. This is the chef’s way to show you that the fish is fresh. Just point to the one you want.

•People may come over to your table and try to talk with you. If you are feeling like throwing yourself into the local mix, just walk over to one of the rowdy tables with a full beer, and say “Gan Bei” [gan-bay] (Bottoms up). They will probably throw you a cigarette and ask you to join their table.

•Watch out for Baijiu (clear hard liquor made of sorghum). This drink can be an acquired taste for Westerners and quality can vary widely.

From the International Culinary Tourism Association (www.culinarytourism.org). Check out ICTA’s new partner, FoodTrekker.com, a culinary travel Web site for consumers

TAIWAN: Mining Taiwan's Darker History

October 14, 2009

By JOYCE HOR-CHUNG LAU

HONG KONG — The story usually goes like this: China was taken over by Chairman Mao and became a brutal Communist state. Taiwan broke free and became a vibrant democracy. The ugliness of the last half-century — persecution, martial law, mass execution — happened on the mainland.

“Prince of Tears,” the latest film by the Hong Kong-based director Yonfan (who goes by one name), turns that telling of the story on its head. It is the first major movie in 20 years to explore the “White Terror” that followed Taiwan’s separation from China in 1949. In Taiwan, the ruling Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, staged anti-Communist witch hunts that killed thousands.

The gorgeously crafted film, set in the 1950s, refers only obliquely to larger politics. Instead, it focuses on daily life in a remote Taiwanese village where anyone — a schoolteacher, a housewife, a soldier — could commit a political faux pas and be sent to the execution squad.

The project originated with the real-life story of the actress Chiao Chiao, a longtime friend and collaborator of Yonfan, whom she met in Hong Kong when she was a starlet there from the ’60s to the ’80s. The actress, who uses only her surname, grew up in Taiwan, but hid her childhood memories of the White Terror for years until she found a confidant in Yonfan, who also grew up in Taiwan in the 1950s. Several years ago, they decided to make a film based on her memories.

“I never spoke of my past until I found someone I trusted,” Chiao Chiao said of Yonfan. “I was so young when it happened and children back then were not allowed to ask questions.”

The film opens with a scene of a perfect-looking family in Taiwan: a handsome air force pilot, his pretty, doting wife and their two girls.

But, after Kafkaesque political complications, the parents are dragged off and the father is killed in a field. As the executioners fire their shots, his daughters hide in the tall grass in a desperate attempt to get one last glimpse of him.

“It begins like a fairy tale, with this beautiful family playing music in the woods,” Yonfan said. “But it’s actually a black fairy tale set during the White Terror.”

The younger sister — the character representing Chiao Chiao — is sent to live with an eerie and physically scarred government agent nicknamed Uncle Ding, whom she suspects is the informer who turned in her father. In a strange turn of events, her mother is released from a prison camp and — under pressure to resume a normal family life and support her girls — gives into advances by Uncle Ding, whom she marries.

“My father really did play the accordion,” Chiao Chiao said in an interview, referring to the idyllic opening scene in which he serenades his daughters. “I remember my mother going away and coming back. I remember being separated from my sister and being sent to live with Uncle Ding in a warehouse. My mother really did remarry. She’s still in Taiwan today and 88 years old.”

While speaking, Chiao Chiao flipped through an album of old family photos and dabbed at her eyes. She had declined to be interviewed during the 2009 Venice Film Festival last month, where “Prince of Tears” had its premiere and was well received, because she found it too difficult.

“Of course there are changes to some details, and my memory is sketchy; but Yonfan captured those feelings,” she said.

In addition to Venice, “Prince of Tears,” which is currently beginning its release in Hong Kong and Taiwan, has also been screened on the festival circuit in Toronto and at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea, which runs through Friday. It has also been chosen as Hong Kong’s submission for the Academy Awards for best foreign language film.

At his Hong Kong studio, Yonfan traced a finger over the elaborate model of the set he built for the film, which included an entire village with homes and a school.

“I didn’t need a historic researcher,” said Yonfan. “This was my childhood — the traditional clothes, the handmade food. I remember visiting friends’ homes where relatives had disappeared for seemingly no reason.”

“Prince of Tears” veers between the dreamlike and the nightmarish. The village is painted in exaggerated, almost surreal colors — whether it’s the neon yellow of the killing field, or the electric-blue portrait of Chiang Kai-shek that looms over the village.

While the film is a creative work, and not a documentary, close attention was paid to re-create the sights and sounds of 1950s rural Taiwan.

Yonfan’s crew moved to Taiwan for several months to film the movie on location and hired all the extras locally.

As for the principal actors, Asian moviegoers may recognize a few names: Kenneth Tsang, a veteran Hong Kong actor, plays a cold-hearted Nationalist general, while the Taiwanese actress Terri Kwan is his doomed trophy wife. Chiao Chiao makes a cameo appearance as a prison interrogator.

But many of the cast members are relatively new Taiwanese names, like Joseph Chan, who plays a pilot, and Fan Chih-wei, who plays Uncle Ding.

Zhu Xuan, a Beijing native who had been working in Hong Kong television, has her big-screen debut in the film as Chiao Chiao’s mother, who had fled from the mainland to Taiwan.

“When I heard her voice, her accent, it was perfect,” Chiao Chiao said.

The assistant directors auditioned more than 1,000 rural schoolchildren before they chose Yan Xin-Rou and Cai Pei-Han to play the sisters.

“We wanted kids who were village-y, not professionals,” Yonfan said.

There are parts of “Prince of Tears” that leave the viewer guessing and some of the subplots are never explained.

Yonfan said he did this on purpose, as the tale is told from the perspective of the children, who don’t quite grasp the adult conflicts and motivations going on.

The “Prince of Tears” premiere in Venice coincided with the 20th anniversary of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “City of Sadness,” which is the last major film to portray Taiwan’s White Terror.

“Martial law was only lifted in 1987,” said Yonfan, when asked why the subject had been neglected for so long. “After that people wanted lighter films — comedies, romances, kung-fu flicks.”

“This period of history is a scar on the Kuomintang,” he added, referring to the Nationalist Party that regained power in Taiwan, after the Democratic Party lost the 2008 elections.

Yonfan waited until after the vote to release the film. “I didn’t want it to be used as a political vehicle for any party,” he said. “It’s not a film about correcting a political injustice; it’s a film about human frailty.”

The making of the film, and the real lives of the characters that inspired it, are tightly interwoven. In the film, Uncle Ding escorts his friend, the pilot, to his death. After the execution, the agent gets down on his knees and burns paper offerings to the man he felt he had betrayed. After making the film, Yonfan went back to the field where Chiao Chiao’s father is thought have been buried. With him were Chiao Chaio’s sister and Joseph Chang, the actor who played the pilot. “We burned paper offerings,” Yonfan said. “And we prayed to the heavens.”

Copyright 2009

CHINA: Wartime China’s Elegant Enigma

November 4, 2009
Books of The Times

By DWIGHT GARNER

THE LAST EMPRESS
Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China
By Hannah Pakula
Illustrated. 787 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.

“The only thing Oriental about me,” Soong Mei-ling once wrote, “is my face.”

Soong Mei-ling, better known to history as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, was exaggerating only slightly. Chinese by birth, American by education and cultural inclination, she was a seductive blend of both societies; for a time, no woman in the world was more powerful.

Mme. Chiang led a long, vastly complicated life, one that is richly detailed in “The Last Empress,” Hannah Pakula’s long, vastly complicated new biography. Ms. Pakula’s book is a yeoman work of historical research, with fact grinding against fact. It is also a monotonous piece of storytelling, one that has little pliancy or narrative push. Its 681 pages of text are at times as grueling as a forced march across the Mongolian steppe.

The story of Mme. Chiang’s life has lost none of its strange, piquant appeal, however. Born in Shanghai in 1898, she was the daughter of a peasant who had gone to America at age 12 and found work on ships and in printing shops. Her father, Charlie Soong, eventually graduated from Vanderbilt University and returned to China at 20, where he had six children and became rich publishing Bibles. He raised Soong Mei-ling and her siblings to appreciate almost everything Western, including mattresses (soft), food (American) and religion (Methodist).

Cutting against the grain of a staunchly patriarchal society, Mr. Soong expected big things from his daughters as well as from his sons. Soong Mei-ling’s two older sisters traveled to the United States to attend Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Ga. Soong-Mei-ling arrived in America at age 10, studying at a boarding school in New Jersey and a public school in Georgia before graduating from Wellesley College.

When she arrived at Wellesley in 1913, Ms. Pakula writes, Soong Mei-ling could lay on a “Scarlett O’Hara accent” she’d picked up in Georgia. (“Ah reckon Ah shan’t stay aroun’ much longer,” she reportedly told the freshman dean.) She was also, Ms. Pakula writes, “short, chubby, round-faced and childish in appearance, with a short haircut and bangs over her eyes that did nothing for her looks.”

By the time she left Wellesley, however, there was a sense of destiny about Soong Mei-ling. “She had not been given a Western education,” Ms. Pakula observes, “in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table.”

The Soong sisters married well. One, Soong Qing-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, China’s first president after the last emperor was overthrown in 1911. In a lavish ceremony in 1927, Soong Mei-ling married one of Sun’s former military aides, Chiang Kai-shek, a man who would become the head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949, and later its leader while in exile in Taiwan.

He was a hardened soldier who “dressed simply in a plain cotton uniform with straw sandals,” Ms. Pakula writes, and neither drank nor smoked. Mme. Chiang was by now thin, glamorous and wore form-fitting clothes. Barely five feet tall, she had, Ms. Pakula declares, “a near-hypnotic effect on men.”

Because Chiang Kai-shek spoke virtually no English, Mme. Chiang became his de facto translator and the face China turned to the Western world. She wrote articles about China for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly in the early ’40s. She appeared on “Meet the Press” in 1958. She was Chiang’s closest adviser and she constantly buffed his — and the country’s — rough edges.

The pair were seen as a modernizing influence in China; Time magazine named them Man and Woman of the Year in 1938. The peak of Mme. Chiang’s fame arrived in 1943, when she toured America in support of the Nationalist Chinese cause against Japan.

During that tour she was the first private citizen to address the Senate and the House of Representatives, and in Los Angeles she gave a speech to a packed Hollywood Bowl. (While in America, Ms. Pakula suggests, Mme. Chiang continued a romantic involvement she had begun earlier with Wendell Willkie, the Republican who had lost the 1940 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.)

Chiang Kai-shek’s government, increasingly besieged by China’s Communist Party as the 1940s went on, was also rotting from within. He was a ruthless, petty man and a dismal leader. As Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby observed, “The manners of the Kuomintang” — the Nationalist Party — “in public were perfect; its only faults were that its leadership was corrupt, its secret police merciless, its promises lies, and its daily diet the blood and tears of the people of China.”

Eleanor Roosevelt got a chilling glimpse of Mme. Chiang’s own dark side when Mrs. Roosevelt asked her how she would deal with a difficult labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. “She never said a word,” Ms. Roosevelt wrote, “but the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat.”

Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were forced into exile in Taiwan after the Communist victory in 1949; he presided for decades over Nationalist politics from there. After his death, in 1975, Mme. Chiang moved to New York City, where she led a reclusive life, dying in 2003 at 105. She had no children. Her husband had contracted venereal disease before their marriage, Ms. Pakula writes, and was probably sterile.

“The Last Empress” bogs down in overly long discursions into the intricacies of China’s political history. Indeed, Mme. Chiang’s own story often recedes far into the background. But Ms. Pakula’s book comes alive in its pepperings of telling detail about Mme. Chiang’s chaotic life.

Ms. Pakula notes the way Mme. Chiang loved to deploy esoteric words (“indehiscence,” “ochlocracy”) in her speeches in English, sending reporters scrambling for their dictionaries. She observes that President Harry S. Truman, tired of Mme. Chiang’s appeals for money, began to refer to her husband as “Cash My-check.”

She details Mme. Chiang’s final years at 10 Gracie Square, an elegant apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There she kept three dogs (two bichons and a Yorkshire terrier) and employed 24 servants. There were reports that neighbors complained about the cooking odors and cockroaches in her 18-room apartment, and that Mme. Chiang kept a closet filled with gold bars.

Ms. Pakula is also the author of “The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania” (1985) and “An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm” (1997). She views Mme. Chiang’s life with interest and occasionally, when warranted, with sympathy. She is clearly in agreement with Eleanor Roosevelt, who summed up Mme. Chiang’s striding performance on the world stage by remarking that while she could “talk beautifully about democracy,” she did “not know how to live democracy.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

CHINA: Tips to Banish Culture Shock in Beijing

If you’re one of the lucky travelers heading to China for the Olympic games, you already know that there’s a certain amount of culture shock involved with going halfway around the world.

If this is your first trip to China, take these travel tips with you to minimize the shock and maximize the enjoyment of your trip.

1.Brush up on your bargaining skills. Shopping in Beijing (outside of the high-end stores and hotels) is an exercise in haggling, so be prepared to argue a bit over price. Don’t show too much interest in an item if you want to keep the upper hand in the bargaining process. Bear in mind that almost everything for sale in the markets are fakes and forgeries, so you definitely shouldn’t pay too much for them. Be friendly, but be firm!

2.Don’t get scammed. Some local con artists will hang out near art displays and Beijing attractions and offer to “help” you buy tickets or show you out-of-the-way art galleries. Don’t fall for these hucksters! The “help” with ticket purchasing means you’ll pay more for the tickets, and the art galleries will contain cheap, poor-quality pieces that you’ll be pressured into buying. Stay on the beaten path and with the other visitors to Beijing and simply wave a “no, thank you” to the con men.

3.Try new things, especially new foods. As noted in The Travel Detective Bible, as long as the food is cooked, boiled or peeled, you should try it, even if it’s unrecognizable to you. You will discover some amazing delicacies this way. The street vendors are some of the best sources of local fare, and as long as the vendor doesn’t look filthy and the food doesn’t appear to have been sitting there for a long time, give it a try!

4.Alter your definition of “rude.” In China, it’s not rude to belch, shove, spit and shout. You don’t have to do as the locals do, but keep in mind that they don’t mean any offense to your Western sensibilities.

5.Try your hand at a few Chinese words. The language isn’t as scary as it seems, and knowing a few key phrases will help you get around and conduct transactions more smoothly. Here’s one to get you started: “tai gui le” (”too expensive”).

6.Don’t fear the toilets. In the past, China’s public restroom situation was not one for the weak-stomached. But in preparing for the Olympics, Beijing has put major effort into overhauling public facilities, building new ones, and improving comfort and sanitation. The three-year, $57 million (in U.S. dollars) investment has ensured that Beijing’s 5,333 public toilets are clean, flushable and easily-accessible to all parts of the city. Several hundred more are being built in or near the Olympic venues, as well. After all, clean and sanitary restrooms are an indicator of a city’s civilizaton and living standards, Chinese officials say. As for the complaints that the Asian squat-toilets will be difficult for Westerners to use, the Chinese are busy installing sit-down toilets to accommodate those who prefer that style.

If you embrace the local culture and put these tips into practice, your travels to Beijing should be full of wonderful new experiences and very few headaches. Have a great trip!

By Erica Adams for PeterGreenberg.com.