Google appears to be getting closer to shutting down its strictly monitored search engine in China, according to news reports.

The reports, which cited people close to the situation, indicate that Google advertisers in China are being advised to switch over to rival Baidu Inc., out of fears that Google could abandon the country.

Following a targeted cyber attack on Gmail accounts emanating from China in December, Google announced on Jan. 12 that it intended to give all of its users open access to the Internet.

Google has since been negotiating with the Chinese government, as such a move would clash with China’s censorship laws. Those laws forbid access to Internet sites that criticize the government, display pornography or promote certain religious material.

A spokeswoman for Google declined to comment specifically on the negotiations, but reiterated the company’s intentions to remain an open-access site and said Google will soon make an announcement on the outcome of its dealings with China.

[Read more at CNN]

Carlos Slim Helú. Photo: José Cruz/ABr (CC)

A sure sign that the balance of power is shifting away from the United States and Europe towards developing nations is shown in the new Forbes list, with the Mexican Carlos Slim Helu beating out Bill Gates for the top spot and China claiming more billionaires than any country outside the US.

India’s billionaires, however, are richer, as reported in the Christian Science Monitor:

With the release of the latest Forbes rich list of billionaires, India is finding much to brag about – even as other fast-growing economies like China make their mark.

Eight Indians made Forbes magazine’s latest list of the top 100 billionaires, and two – energy tycoon Mukesh Ambani and steel mogul Lakshmi Mittal – sit in the top 5. Mr. Ambani is now the fourth richest person in the world, and the richest person in the Asia-Pacific region.

The highest-ranking Chinese person on the list is Li Ka-shing of Hong Kong, ranked No. 14 with $21 billion.

Ten of Asia’s top 25 billionaires are Indian, while one is from China.

Although China has more billionaires overall than India (and every other country besides the United States, for the first time), Indian billionaires are richer. According to a local edition of Forbes last November, the wealthiest 100 Indians are collectively worth $276 billion, while their top 100 Chinese counterparts are worth $170 billion.

The three richest Indians – Ambani brothers Mukesh and Anil and Mr. Mittal – together had more wealth the top 24 Chinese billionaires combined…

[continues in the Christian Science Monitor]

MSN

A woman has alarmed her small village in China after growing a 6cm horn on her forehead in less than a year.

Zhang Ruifang, 101, says she is also concerned about the appearance of a second mark on the other side of her forehead.

“We didn’t pay too much attention to it [at first] … but as time went on a horn grew out of her head,” said Mrs Zhang’s son Zhang Guozheng.

China plans to step up its use of the weather modification techniques that brought sunny skies for both the Beijing Olympics and last year’s giant military parade on National Day.

The official China Daily newspaper reported Thursday that China is even going to try to regulate the weather during the five-month long Shanghai Expo that begins on May 1.

“The Shanghai event will be a challenge as it lasts 184 days and may be affected by monsoons and high temperatures,” the paper said.

Zheng Guoguang, head of China’s Meteorological Administration, told the paper that manipulating the weather is a developing science that needed more research and study. “It is still at a research-and-use stage and there are still a lot of problems to be resolved.”

Still, Zheng said China is already actively involved in modifying the weather over a large part of the country in an effort to improve crop yields, particularly wheat. Some 840 flights were made to increase rainfall last year, he said, and 116,000 rockets and 8,900 artillery shells were fired into the atmosphere.

Read More: National Post

Has the global economy recovered? Forecasters say there will be an uptick this year of 2.4 percent, but they’re forgetting something. China could fail soon, and, if it does, the world’s most populous state will drag the rest of us down.

At this moment, a Chinese crisis seems like the last thing we should be worried about. After all, last year China overtook America as the planet’s largest car market and passed Germany as the biggest exporter.

On Thursday, Beijing announced that growth for the fourth quarter of 2009 was 10.7 percent and 8.7 percent for the entire year. Some analysts said the numbers were so strong that the country zoomed past Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Stock markets, property prices, you name it: Everything Chinese is soaring.

Dubai was once soaring, too. Global markets therefore, shuddered in November at the news that Dubai World, Dubai’s state investment firm and biggest corporate debtor, had asked for an extension on its $59 billion of obligations. Troubles in the booming emirate had been evident for some time, but stock investors were nonetheless caught unawares, apparently thinking a default would not occur.

They were obviously wrong. Global markets, for the time being, got past the shock, in part because the emirate is small. China, on the other hand, is not. Legendary short-seller James Chanos, who predicted the failures of Enron and Tyco, calls the country “Dubai times 1,000 – or worse.”

[Read more at The Christian Science Monitor]

A mound strewn with dinosaur bones is seen October 2009 in Zhucheng, in northeast China’s Shandong province. Paleontologists in China have uncovered more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints, state media reported, in an area said to be the world’s largest grouping of fossilised bones belonging to the ancient animals.

Archaeologists in China have uncovered more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints, state media reported, in an area said to be the world’s largest grouping of fossilised bones belonging to the ancient animals.

The footprints, believed to be more than 100 million years old, were discovered after a three-month excavation at a gully in Zhucheng in the eastern province of Shandong, the Xinhua news agency reported.
The prints range from 10 to 80 centimetres (four to 32 inches) in length, and belonged to at least six different kinds of dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs, the report said Saturday.

Wang Haijun, a senior engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the prints faced the same direction, Xinhua said.

This indicated a possible migration or a panic escape by plant-eating dinosaurs after an attack by predators, Wang added.

Archeologists have found dinosaur fossils at some 30 sites in Zhucheng, known as “dinosaur city.”…

BAGHDAD (AFP) — China has agreed to cancel 80 percent of the 8.5-billion-dollar debt it is owed by Iraq, the finance ministry in Baghdad said in an official statement on Tuesday.

It said a bilateral agreement was signed in Beijing, without specifying the date, and that China’s ambassador to Iraq had met officials in Baghdad to confirm the agreement.

The statement added that the two countries entered into trade deals valued at 3.8 billion dollars in 2009.

Read More: American Free Press via the Tehran Times

Everyone in the commune must be under 4ft 3 ins tall and they run their own police force and fire brigade from their 120 residents. Now the group has turned itself into a tourist attraction by building mushroom houses and living and dressing like fairy tale characters.

“As small people we are used to being pushed around and exploited by big people. But here there aren’t any big people and everything we do is for us,” said spokesman Fu Tien.

Google’s clash with China is about much more than the fate of a single, powerful firm. The company’s decision to pull out of China, unless the government there changes its policies on censorship, is a harbinger of increasingly stormy relations between the US and China.

The reason that the Google case is so significant is because it suggests that the assumptions on which US policy to China have been based since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 could be plain wrong. The US has accepted – even welcomed – China’s emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalisation in China.

If that assumption changes, American policy towards China could change with it. Welcoming the rise of a giant Asian economy that is also turning into a liberal democracy is one thing. Sponsoring the rise of a Leninist one-party state, that is America’s only plausible geopolitical rival, is a different proposition. Combine this political disillusionment with double-digit unemployment in the US that is widely blamed on Chinese currency manipulation, and you have the formula for an anti-China backlash.

Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush firmly believed that free trade and, in particular, the information age would make political change in China irresistible. On a visit to China in 1998, Mr Clinton proclaimed: “In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is essential to the greatness of any nation.” A year later, Mr Bush made a similar point: “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy … Trade freely with the Chinese and time is on our side.”

The two presidents were reflecting the conventional wisdom among America’s most influential pundits. Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of best-selling books on globalisation, once proclaimed bluntly: “China’s going to have a free press. Globalisation will drive it.” Robert Wright, one of Mr Clinton’s favourite thinkers, argued that if China chose to block free access to the internet, “the price would be dismal economic failure”.

So far, the facts are refusing to conform to the theory…

[continues in the Financial Times]

Google’s announcement that it may quit China over censorship and hacking drew applause, warnings and bouquets from dissidents and Internet activists on Wednesday, with few seeing much chance of the wary government giving ground.

Google, the world’s top search engine, said it might shut its Chinese-language google.cn website after China-based cyber attacks on dissidents using its Gmail service.

At the company’s China headquarters in Beijing’s university district, a dozen locals laid a bouquet of red roses and white lilies on Google’s sign at the company entrance.

They praised the company, shouting some salty Beijing slang.

“We want to express outrage, but not at Google. Coming here is a type of support for Google,” said IT worker Zhao Gang, 30.

“Google faces very strict and adverse conditions in China. Something we knew in our hearts is now out in the open. I believe it’s a watershed moment for the Internet in China this year.”

Chinese activists have long complained that China’s Communist Party has tightened its grip on the Internet, stifling the spread of information and ideas in the name of public safety and morals.

Their complaints have now been echoed by the world’s biggest Internet firm and by Washington, where Hillary Clinton said the Chinese government should explain the attacks.

With such volleys aimed at China, Internet control is sure to climb the pile of frictions between Washington and Beijing, joining economic disputes, arms sales to Taiwan and Tibet.

“The surprise isn’t the hacking or censorship. That’s everywhere here,” said Liu Ning, a writer and blogger in Beijing. “The surprise is such a big company breaking the silence about all these problems … Until now, they’ve kept quiet.”

[Read more at Reuters]

The U.S. search giant’s announcement that it will stop censoring its Chinese search site, and may withdraw from the country altogether, triggered an outpouring of concern, and some anger, among Chinese Internet users. Students…gathered at Google’s offices in Beijing and Shanghai Wednesday with flowers in an emotional show of support for the company.

BEIJING — The tomb of Cao Cao, a renowned warlord and politician in the third century, was unearthed in Anyang City of central China’s Henan Province, archaeologists said Sunday.

Cao Cao (155–220 A.D.), who built the strongest and most prosperous state during the Three Kingdom period (208–280 A.D.), is remembered for his outstanding military and political talents. Cao Cao is also known for his poems that reflected his strong character. Some of the poems are included in China’s middle school textbooks.

Three ancient corpses, one man and two women, were found in the two-chamber tomb in Xigaoxue village of Anyang. The man was found to have died in his sixties, which coincides the age of Cao Cao when he died, Liu Qingzhu, director of the academic committee of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told a press conference in Beijing.

More than 250 articles, made of gold, silver, pottery and etc, were unearthed from the 740-square-meter tomb, a size appropriate for a king. Archaeologists also found 59 engraved stone plates logging the name and amount of the articles buried in the tomb. Seven of the plates logged weapons “often used by the king of Wei”, or Cao Cao, Liu said.

Read More: China View

China’s most prominent dissident, Liu Xiaobo, was jailed on Friday for 11 years for campaigning for political freedoms, with the stiff sentence on a subversion charge swiftly condemned by rights groups and Washington.

Liu, who turns 54 on Monday, helped organize the “Charter 08″ petition which called for sweeping political reforms, and before that was prominent in the 1989 pro-democracy protests centered on Tiananmen Square that were crushed by armed troops.

He stood quietly in a Beijing courtroom as a judge found him guilty of “inciting subversion of state power” for his role in the petition and for online essays critical of the ruling Communist Party, defense lawyer Shang Baojun said.

Liu was not allowed to respond in court to the sentence.

“Xiaobo and I were very calm when the verdict was read. We were mentally prepared for it that he would get a long sentence,” said Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, who was allowed in to hear the verdict. She was barred from the trial on Wednesday.

“Later we were allowed 10 minutes together, and he told me he would appeal, even if the chances of success are low,” she said.

Liu has been among the most combative critics of China’s one-Party rule. His case attracted an outcry from Western government and rights activists at home and abroad. The unusually harsh sentence drew a fresh outcry that is likely to grow.

[Read more at Reuters]

Population and climate change are intertwined but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming, according to Zhao Baige, vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission of China (NPFPC).

“Dealing with climate change is not simply an issue of CO2 emission reduction but a comprehensive challenge involving political, economic, social, cultural and ecological issues, and the population concern fits right into the picture,” said Zhao, who is a member of the Chinese government delegation.

Many studies link population growth with emissions and the effect of climate change.

“Calculations of the contribution of population growth to emissions growth globally produce a consistent finding that most of past population growth has been responsible for between 40 per cent and 60 percent of emissions growth,” so stated by the 2009 State of World Population, released earlier by the UN Population Fund.

Although China’s family planning policy has received criticism over the past three decades, Zhao said that China’s population program has made a great historic contribution to the well-being of society.

As a result of the family planning policy, China has seen 400 million fewer births, which has resulted in 18 million fewer tons of CO2 emissions a year, Zhao said…

In 1969, Chairman Mao commanded the construction of a second Beijing beneath the surface of the original city, designed to accommodate all six million of its then inhabitants so that if nuclear war did kick off, folk would still have somewhere to hang out and play Mah Jong while the rest of us burnt to death in a shower of atomic rain. War never came, but the city is still there.

Check it out…

http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2009/11/17/chairman-mao%E2%80%99s-underground-city/

August 21, theatres around the nation screened the documentary I.O.U.S.A. and a live discussion with America’s most notable financial leaders and policy experts, including Warren Buffett; William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute; Pete Peterson, senior chairman of The Blackstone Group and former U.S. Comptroller General, Dave Walker.

August 25, Mr. William Niskanen, CEO of the Cato Institute, confirmed his remarks on the I.O.U.S.A. post-broadcast panel discussion.

Dear Mr. Singer,

I do not have a tape of my remarks last Thursday evening. As I remember, however, I expressed being puzzled why the central banks of China, Japan, and South Korea have continued to invest so much in U.S. Treasury securities.  For these central banks have earned a negative real return on these securities, for which the interest rate has been lower than the depreciation of the dollar.

I would value your judgment about this puzzle… William A. Niskanen

China is a “Hot Topic” at the nationally and internationally recognized Center for Trade Policy at Mr. Niskanen’s Cato Institute, but the research staff has been unable to find a political, diplomatic, military or economic solution to the China puzzle, because there isn’t one.

China’s economic policy is an enigma that would baffle Ludwig von Mises and Karl Marx. The answer to the Chinese enigma: China is now the Air Pollution champion of the world.

No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage. But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, its pollution problem has shattered all records as well.

China’s environmental degradation is so severe it has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, Tokyo and according to the Journal of Geophysical Research, much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China.

Chinese officials, before and after the Tiananmen Square massacre, pretend to pursue economic development and industrialization for the benefit of their population, but in spite of the glitter of China’s big cities and the rise of its billionaire class, the vast majority of the Chinese people are repressed, working in slave labor camps and living in poverty.

The path China took to industrialization was unusual.  John Watson, Professor at Reno-based Desert Research Institute, notes: “They’re making a lot of the same mistakes we made in our air pollution history. You can just see the parallels: they’re building more highways and encouraging more sprawl.”

Mistakes?  Consider the Communists First Five-Year Plan

When Communism became the ideology of the people in 1949, they fought pollution during the successful First Five-Year Plan from 1953-57 and were moving towards 100% recycling until 1958 when the Great Leap Forward became the Great Leap Famine and between 16.5 million and 40 million people died before the experiment came to an end in 1961.

During the Five-Year Plan, Chinese articles and journals extolled the benefits of recycling. “When a case of pollution arose, there was scientific and collective action to undo the damage. The most harmful industrial wastewater is that which contains phenol. If this kind of poisonous industrial water is drained into a body of water (such as a river, lake, or sea) before treatment, it will pollute the water, kill the fish, and endanger the health of the people. And if such poisonous waste water is drained into the farmland, it will badly affect the normal growth of the crops.”

The “Mistakes” explanation requires you believe no one in China read or studied the industrialization of the Western Countries. “Cost-benefit analyses in the U.S. show that emission reduction programs have provided much greater benefits than their costs, by a ratio of up to 40 to 1. Air pollution damage not only impacts the ecosystem but imposes major economic costs as well as, from premature mortality, increased health care and lost productivity and, more importantly, decreased crop yields.”

Air Pollution thick as Pea Soup

A World Bank study found China is home to 16 of the world’s 20 worst cities for air quality. Three-quarters of the water flowing through urban areas is unsuitable for drinking or fishing.

Pea-soup air in Beijing is caused in part by a sudden switch from bicycles to automobiles as a means of transportation. With nearly 156 million motor vehicles, bicycles are no longer welcome in cities that are being rebuilt to accommodate automobiles.

China’s bike lanes have been sacrificed in the name of road and highway construction. In the Fujian province, Chinese city and regional officials went so far as to ban electric bicycles because they were worried “the lead-acid batteries are an environmental risk, and that the use of electric bikes undercuts the use of public transit.” Both arguments apply far better to automobiles, but automobiles are encouraged and riding a bicycle without a license can get you arrested.

Following Western Pollution’s Footsteps

The U.S. also sacrificed mass transit in the 1930’s when the National City Lines (NCL) converted the nation into an automobile-dependent society by dismantling most streetcar systems throughout the United States.

John D. Rockefeller, the #1 wealthiest man in all recorded history, was a founding member of the NCL holding company and our “Federal” Reserve Bank.  Under the ruse of Christian temperance, he gave $4 million to a group of old ladies, and the temperance movement was no longer about drinking alcohol but about the knob on the dashboard of the Model T.

The knob allowed the driver to adjust the fuel-air mixture for either alcohol (ethanol) or gas. Henry Ford said that alcohol was “a cleaner, nicer, better fuel for automobiles than gasoline.”  Ironically, no one followed Henry’s advice until 2000 when George W. Bush subsidized Archer Daniels Midland to burn up, according to the distinguished McKnight University Professor C. Ford Runge, enough calories to feed one person for a year every time we fill up the 25-gallon tank in our SUV.

The Federal Reserve and John D. were behind our automobile-dependent consumer society and the outlawing of the production and sale of alcohol. John D. was a notorious “robber baron”, so we naturally assume his motivation was greed and profit.

But Rockefeller, known as a brilliant businessman and visionary, already owned or controlled most of the world at the end of the 19th century and as a member of the Federal Reserve he understood no one gets wealthier printing their own Monopoly money.

Therefore, if profits were the motive of the world’s richest man – John D. would have bought up all of the farmland in the United States or for that matter all of the farmland in the world, so he could really control the knob on the Model T.

Then Henry Kissinger’s quote would have been: “Control ethanol you control nations and people”

Rockefeller and the Federal Reserve were critical to our fossil fueled industrial and consumer society, but that also made them responsible for much of the environmental damage done to the planet.

China’s leaders and their Central Bank were critical to the unprecedented growth of the Chinese economy that benefited the West, but replacing bicycles with automobiles is responsible for much of the environmental damage done to the East, West, North and South.

The vast trade surplus of $1.4 trillion and counting, a result of official Chinese government intervention to depress the Renminbi (RMB), is that every person in the (rich) U.S. has borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China so the Chinese economy can produce the most environmental damage in our history.

Our last president Bush wasn’t “stupid” if his goal was Ecocide.

All too often we see the result of failed public policies, government actions and inactions, and conclude the leadership is inept, arrogant or just “stupid.”

At the G8 summit, George W. Bush said, “Goodbye, from the (then) world’s biggest polluter.” He proposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, which would trash America’s last arctic wilderness. Sonar testing is about torturing whales and dolphins, and the border fence that keeps everything out but the illegals is disrupting an extraordinary source of biological diversity along a 2,000-mile-long region that includes deserts, mangrove forests, plains, mountains, river valleys and wetlands.

Chinese officials are worried about their people eating…meat

On November 11, 2008, NPR aired the story: “Chinese Government Fights Recession,” where Beijing’s correspondent Anthony Kuhn reports:  “there is a lot of worry in the government that ordinary Chinese were not going to be able to afford to eat meat.”

In 1980, when China’s population was still under one billion, the average Chinese ate 20kg (44lbs) of meat. Last year (2007), with an additional 300 million people, it was 54kg.

Promoting meat in the world’s highest populous country and diverting grain to fatten animals will be,  “the end of self-sufficiency for China,” says James Rice, Chief of China Operations for Tyson Foods. “This year will be the last in which China produces enough corn for itself, and the last that it is self-sufficient in protein.”

The editors of World Watch state that “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future—deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease.”

Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: “Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there’s milk and meat.”

Automobiles milk and meat are the answer to the Chinese enigma; China is on the bridge to ecocide.

For the first time in 18 years, the Dalai Lama is visiting Washington this week without stopping by to see the U.S. president.

Tibet’s exiled religious leader — brushed aside by U.S. President Barack Obama in favor of communist China — was saluted at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday for his work for human rights. The presentation ceremony underscored Obama’s dilemma in dealing with China, a growing power and the biggest holder of U.S. debt.

The decision not to meet the Tibetan leader was made amid efforts to improve U.S.-Chinese relations on issues from stemming global warming to reigning in North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

In a statement, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, accused Obama of “kowtowing to Beijing” by refusing to meet with the 74-year-old monk.

BEIJING — When Qiu Zhijie organized a show of fellow young artists in the basement of a suburban Beijing apartment complex a decade ago, police burst in and closed it after just one day. Contemporary art was taboo, and Mr. Qiu was especially provocative, with installations that mocked China’s rising consumerism.

Today, Mr. Qiu is as active as ever. His current project looks at the costs of China’s 60 years of communism by contrasting the official, heroic history of a giant bridge over the Yangtze River with the span’s role as China’s top place for suicides.

But there’s a key difference: Mr. Qiu is now a member of the Chinese cultural establishment. He has a senior teaching post at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou. And unlike the old days, exhibitions of his works now fill large halls, staying up for weeks, not hours.

Few art scenes have been as whiplashed by change as China’s. As the People’s Republic begins a week of celebrations Thursday to mark its 60th anniversary, the country’s often-edgy contemporary artists are a proxy for the country’s fast-changing political landscape…