China

Modern China RSS feed -- recent issues

Total news: 20
Last news: November 30, 1999 00:00:00

A blog about strategy, business, trends and convergence

Total news: 10
Last news: June 25, 2007 16:49:00

Oil prices are heading north.

None of us have seen any real increase like the sort of prices we have ahead of us.

The International Energy Agency, which monitors oil markets on behalf of industrialized nations, is forecasting average global oil demand of 86.1 million barrels a day this year, up 2 percent from last year. That is twice as fast as the 0.9% growth recorded in 2006, compared with 2005.

Demand is expected to accelerate further in the fourth quarter to 88 million barrels a day, an unprecedented quarterly volume and up 2.6 million barrels a day from the year-earlier period. In the second quarter, global oil demand already has risen at a 1.7% rate, more than double the 0.8% a year ago, according to forecasts and data compiled by the IEA.

A little dated but still worth knowing, I found this article about a chap - "Matt Cutts works for Google and has a blog about how to court their search engine; so, when Matt flaps his blog wings in America there is a tsunami on the far side of the Internet."

Which alleges that - According to China Internet Network Information Center, CNNIC, Google is losing market share from 33% last year to current 25.3%.

It goes on to support this at the following link @ Linux World .

Revenues from broadcasting and new media rights for the 2010 and 2012 Olympics have already risen nearly 40 percent from the previous two-Games package, which includes the Beijing Olympics, and will be in excess of $3.0 billion.

The IOC estimates some 15 percent of that will come from new media including the internet and mobile phones.

Popular photo-sharing site Flickr has announced plans to launch a version in the Chinese language.

The move from Yahoo-owned Flickr is part of its attempts to localise and increase the accessibility of its websites, especially in Asia.

Yahoos Fiasco in China translation off of, this by Paul Woodward and�the China Web 2.0 Review for pointing me towards the new English version of YeeYan.

Check out :�"US Internet companies top 10 mistakes".�

Some good granularity here on the state of the internet in China, the full report is attached as a pdf.

"On January 23, 2007, CNNIC published "the 19th Statistical Survey Report on Internet Development in China".

The report shows that by the end of 2006, the Internet users in China reached 137 million, account for 10.5% of Chinas population. The Internet penetration in Beijing exceeded 30% for the first time. The total amount of domain names in China increased remarkably. Over 1.8 million .CN domain names had been registered.

The registration increased 64.4% in just one year. 75.9% of Chinese Internet users or 104 million people use broadband connections that include xDSL, Cable Modem and leased line. The scale of mobile phone Internet users has also expanded with the total number reached 17 million.

Comparing to the same period last year, Chinas Internet users increased by 26 million. The growth rate (23.4%) rose again since the rate dropped in 2004 (18.2%) and 2005 (18.1%).

Under the native environment of rapid development of the Internet, China show greater demand and developed broader application on Internet addresses.

Total domain names in China now touched 4,109,020, which is 1.16 million more than 6 months ago, averaged at 200 thousand net growths per month.

The .CN domain name reach 1,803,393, which are 706,469 or 64.4% greater than the same period last year. The .CN today ranks fourth among all ccTLDs and brings Chinas Internet into the .CN era.

The report newly added the survey on network resources of domestic webpage number and byte quantities of website contents.

The results show that by the end of 2006, China has 4.47 billion webpages and 122,306 GB of webpage contents, the annual growth rates of these two are 86.3% and 81.7% respectively. Along with vast growth of these domestic Internet resources, the total websites and IPv4 addresses in China also grow rapidly and reached 843 thousand and 98 million respectively." -�[Read�more]

An interesting insight into China and the Web.

" February 16 -- A top official from Chinas official agency in charge of press and publishing suggested in an interview with the overseas edition of Chinas official Peoples Daily that Chinas unique cultural character made it particularly suited to the development of a Web-based economy, and that he expected the countrys Web economy to surpass that of many Western countries. "

After a few day of stuffing little red envelopes with lucky lai see money and myself�with dumplings and taking in the always outstanding HK Harbour fireworks it was a relief to catch something other than Year of the Pig fare and find Sage�Brennans�THIS WEEK IN CHINA.

His comment on the overwhelming prevalence of bulletin board�systems BBS still dominating Chinas internet culture has motivated me to look further into the use of BBSs to cut thru the noise created by blogging and gaming to better appreciate where exactly�consumer tastes & sensibilties lie.

After surfing a few that I found Im in agreement with him [ that reading BBSs in China, that�] ..."Its one way to cope with an exploding market ... -�[Read�more]

A good source on the players emerging in internet video in China published by Danwei and updated from time to time. -�[Read�more]

Rural industry in China has played an important role in driving national economic growth and facilitating economic reform over the past two decades. One prominent feature of rural industrialization in China is its geographic concentration around urban centers. Existing literature suggests that the dynamic growth of rural industries should be examined in the context of urban agglomeration because it is an integral part of the post-reform urban expansion. This study considers three possible mechanisms: (1) capital trickle-down from state-owned enterprises in the city, (2) technology spillovers embodied in urban technical personnel moonlighting in and commuting to nearby rural firms, and (3) urban consumer market potential. Statistical analysis of a large county-level data set (1985-91) shows that cities with a large stock of technical personnel and high consumer market potential tend to foster rural nonagricultural growth in the surrounding counties, whereas cities with a high concentration of state industrial capital tend to suppress it. Concentration of state industrial capital discouraged rural industrialization because city officials who were used to milking state banks via local state firms may have drained funds out of surrounding rural counties.

Before the government instituted birth control policies, did Chinese families deliberately control birth and fertility? Some scholars believe that natural fertility was indeed a fact in Chinese population history; others argue that the Chinese controlled their fertility by such positive checks as late fertility onset, early stopping of reproduction, and long intervals between births. This article joins the debate by providing ethnographic data collected in Xiaoshan, Zhejiang, in 2002. The ethnographic case studies show that deliberate fertility limitation did exist in both rural and urban communities in Xiaoshan. In addition, the article challenges the assumption that Chinese fertility was shaped by collective control rather than individual interests. On the contrary, it demonstrates that the agency of individuals, particularly of women, was often the driving force in family reproduction.

The early-twentieth-century police of Beijing sprang not only from Japanese and European institutional models but also from the large Eight Banner and Green Standard Gendarmerie of the Qing era. The career of the gendarmerie, which had Ming dynasty and earlier roots and continued after the fall of the Qing until 1924, overlapped with that of the modern police for more than two decades. A significant number of individuals, including some leaders, were active in both forces simultaneously. Although the Qing-era capital cannot be called a "policed society" in all current senses of that term, the gendarmerie exercised considerable control. After 1900, this background sped the emergence of modern police in Beijing, a turn of events that contrasts sharply with contemporaneous urban history in Chengdu as reported by Kristin Stapleton.

This article maps the unique social, gender, and material configurations in the courtesan houses of fin de si�cle Shanghai by portraying Chinese sojourners life in this dream "home." The male sojourners lacked comfortable, homelike lodgings, and as a result adopted courtesan houses not only as places for romantic liaisons but also as sites in which they could entertain friends and join broader social networks under circumstances more comfortable than their temporary lodgings. The courtesan houses were marked by a different sense of family organization, which merely masked their commercial nature, and a different set of gender roles, in which the courtesan challenged normative understandings of male and female. Finally, the new types of relationships between clients and courtesans were increasingly structured around material objects. This new urban culture, I argue, embodied a new consciousness of time, space, and materiality that constitutes a modernity distinctly different from the positivist conception of the modern marked by linear progress.

Current Chinese debates about "modernity" focus on what Chinese law was and is, and where it should go from here; this article argues that the answer should be sought in historical processes involved in the pursuit of modern ideals—such as scientific knowledge, industrial development, and citizen rights—and not in any one theory or ideology. The essay attempts to excavate from the past centurys history of Chinese legal practice components of what might be considered Chinese modernity, with examples from such major areas of civil law as inheritance-old age support, property rights, torts, and divorce. In addition, it emphasizes the court mediation system created by the Chinese Communist Party and the "practical moralism" mode of thinking evident in both imperial and modern Chinese lawmaking, pointing out the many commonalities they share with the current "alternative dispute resolution" movement of the West and with the legal pragmatism tradition of modern American law. The proper direction of development of Chinese law lies neither simply in importing the formalist rights laws of the West nor simply in relying on the practical moralism of Chinas past but rather, and properly so, in their long-term coexistence, competition, division of labor, and mutual influence.

The adoption of beancake, a new commercial fertilizer, marked a significant technological advance in Jiangnan agriculture in the late Ming. The popularity of beancake was a result of two developments: the severe fertilizer shortage in Jiangnan and the importation of Manchurian bean products during the Qing. However, recent studies by Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong exaggerate the volume of imports from Manchuria by ten to twenty-five times. They also ignore the limited time frame of the importation of beancake, for it was mainly concentrated in three or four decades during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, though Manchuria had a great potential to produce sufficient beancake to relieve the chronic fertilizer shortage in Jiangnan, this potential remained largely unrealized before foreign countries became involved in the trade. The nineteenth-century agricultural stagnancy in Jiangnan did not result from the absence of the kind of "geographic luck" enjoyed by England, as Pomeranz claims. Instead, Jiangnan failed to take advantage of its privileged access to Manchuria to improve its agriculture.

This article investigates one important aspect of the Chinese legal-judicial reform that was unfolding in the early twentieth century (1901-37): i.e., why and how certain types of violent crimes were categorized and punished outside the criminal code and the criminal procedural law that were adopted as the law of the land and applied in court. It will reveal a continuous tension between, on the one hand, the principles of the rule of law, judicial independence, and due process that guided the legal-judicial reform and were insisted on by judicial officials and, on the other hand, the desire of provincial and county administrative officials to resort to "quick justice" to punish and deter violent crimes. An analysis of that tension will help to illuminate not only criminal law and criminal justice but also an important dimension of provincial and county administrative and judicial practices in early-twentieth-century China.

This article analyzes the struggle that occurred from 1911 to 1921 between two militarists in Guizhou province, Liu Xianshi and his nephew Wang Wenhua, to shed light on the diversity of Chinas warlords and the complexity of their relationships. Although members of the same family, Liu and Wang represented two different generations of militarists, one from the 1911 era and one from the May Fourth era; as a result they became embroiled in a power struggle and a violent coup known as the Minjiu (1920) Incident. The article also examines the various methods and tactics that Guizhou militarists employed in their power struggle, paying particular attention to militarist attempts to control the student movement to serve their own needs. An understanding of these various methods of struggle enhances our insight into the varied nature of warlordism and militarist competition in China during the early twentieth century.

This special issue contains five reassessments of James L. Watson’s influential ideas on the role of ritual in cultural standardization: Kenneth Pomeranz (History, UC Irvine) examines the Bixia yuanjun cult; Michael Szonyi (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard) analyzes the Five Emperors’ cult and ancestral sacrifices in Fuzhou; Paul Katz (Modern History, Academia Sinica) discusses the cult of Marshal Wen and blood sacrifices to banners; Melissa Brown (Anthropological Sciences, Stanford) takes up the case of frontier acculturation; and Donald Sutton (History, Carnegie Mellon) looks at death rituals. To round out the special issue, Professor Watson adds his own rejoinder. On the basis of these essays and other recent scholarship, the introduction in turn questions the effectiveness of state standardization, outlines the phenomenon of heteroprax standardization, argues that "pseudo-orthoprax" local elites subverted the state’s cultural policies, reconsiders the applicability of the paired terms "ritual" and "belief," and underlines the subjectivity of the notion of Chineseness.

This article examines James Watson’s influential work on orthopraxy and cultural unification in late imperial China through a study of the cult of the goddess of Taishan. In this case the state (a crucial promoter of standardization for Watson) was internally divided, local elites took a hard line against popular practices, and ritual became increasingly disunified across classes, regions, and genders. Eventually, popular lore about the goddess changed to reflect an awareness of elite rejection and to celebrate the goddess’s ability to pursue her own goals despite often hostile male authorities. What "cultural unity" one can find here is paradoxical and based not on rituals but beliefs: a shared sense that Taishan was sacred territory worth contesting, popular awareness that elites did not welcome their claims on it, and other signs that groups marked their disagreements with each other, rather than either ignoring differences of ideas or disguising them behind shared ritual.