China – Page 9 – artdiamondblog.com

Dubai Has Strong Ruling Clan, But Weak Institutions

Source of book image: http://www.christopherdavidson.net/sitebuilder/images/DVOS_cover-210×300.jpg

(p. 4) For Mr. Davidson, Dubai’s greatest weakness lies in its autocratic governing system. Politics in the emirate, as in most of the Middle East, pivots not on institutions but on clans — a ruling dynasty and its favorites who own and run Dubai in opaque fashion.

True enough, but most of the Middle East is authoritarian, yet Dubai’s enlightened despotism and welcoming social environment have stood out for fostering economic advance. Like China, albeit on a tiny scale, Dubai is engaged in an experiment of economic liberalization without political democracy.
Mr. Davidson further contends that unstable neighbors threaten Dubai’s success, but here he may have matters reversed. When Egypt and Iran stifle their entrepreneurs, many of them find a wide berth in Dubai. When Saudi Arabia imposes cultural restrictions on its population, Dubai offers a place to drink and let loose. When India and Pakistan have trouble creating jobs for their large populations, Dubai absorbs labor migrants. When Iraq or Lebanon descends into war, Dubai profits from rebuilding them.
In short, until a vast arc of countries from East Africa to Southeast Asia changes substantially, Dubai will remain poised to benefit by providing a relatively open, secure, low-tax, business-friendly alternative.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN KOTKIN. “OFF THE SHELF; The Glittering Emirate, Revisited.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., December 7, 2008): 4.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 6, 2008, and the title “OFF THE SHELF; Dubai, the Glittering Emirate, Revisited.”)

The book under review, is:
Davidson, Christopher M. Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Global Warming Allows Russians to Build Liquefied Natural Gas Plant in Arctic

“A rendering of Novatek’s proposed $20 billion liquefied natural gas plant on Russia’s Arctic coast, scheduled to be done by 2016.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) YURKHAROVSKOYE GAS FIELD, Russia — The polar ice cap is melting, and if executives at the Russian energy company Novatek feel guilty about profiting from that, they do not let it be known in public.

From this windswept shore on the Arctic Ocean, where Novatek owns enormous natural gas deposits, a stretch of thousands of miles of ice-free water leads to China. The company intends to ship the gas directly there.
. . .
Novatek, in partnership with the French energy company Total and the China National Petroleum Corporation, is building a $20 billion liquefied natural gas plant on the central Arctic coast of Russia. It is one of the first major energy projects to take advantage of the summer thawing of the Arctic caused by global warming.
The plant, called Yamal LNG, would send gas to Asia along the sea lanes known as the Northeast Passage, which opened for regular international shipping only four years ago.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW E. KRAMER. “Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Natural Gas.” The New York Times (Thurs., July 25, 2013): B1 & B6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date July 24, 2013, and has the title “Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Natural Gas.”)

Children of Chinese Entrepreneurs Want to Work for Government

“Engineering student Xie Chaobo has yet to land a job.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) BEIJING–Xie Chaobo figures he has the credentials to land a job at one of China’s big state-owned firms. He is a graduate student at Tsinghua University, one of China’s best. His field of study is environmental engineering, one of China’s priorities. And he is experimenting with new techniques for identifying water pollutants, which should make him a valuable catch.
But he has applied to 30 companies so far and scored just four interviews, none of which has led to a job.
Although Mr. Xie’s parents are entrepreneurs who have built companies that make glasses, shoes and now water pumps, he has no interest in working at a private startup. Chinese students “have been told since we were children to focus on stability instead of risk,” the 24-year-old engineering student says.
Over the past decade, the number of new graduates from Chinese universities has increased sixfold to more than six million a year, creating an epic glut that is depressing wages, (p. A10) leaving many recent college graduates without jobs and making students fearful about their future. Two-thirds of Chinese graduates say they want to work either in the government or big state-owned firms, which are seen as recession-proof, rather than at the private companies that have powered China’s remarkable economic climb, surveys indicate. Few college students today, according to the surveys, are ready to leave the safe shores of government work and “jump into the sea,” as the Chinese expression goes, to join startups or go into business for themselves, although many of their parents did just that in the 1990s.

For the full story, see:
MIKE RAMSEY and VALERIE BAUERLEIN. “Tesla Clashes With Car Dealers; Electric-Vehicle Maker Wants to Sell Directly to Consumers; Critics Say Plan Violates Franchise Laws.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 18, 2013): B1-B2.

Source of table: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Chinese Peasants Applied Precautionary Principle to Scythe Technology

(p. 249) In a letter Orville Wright wrote to his inventor friend Henry Ford, Wright recounts a story he heard from a missionary stationed in China. Wright told Ford the story for the same reason I tell it here: as a cautionary tale about speculative risks. The missionary wanted to improve the laborious way the Chinese peasants in his province harvested grain. The local farmers clipped the stalks with some kind of small hand shear. So the missionary had a scythe shipped in from America and demonstrated its superior productivity to an enthralled crowd. “The next morning, however, a delegation came to see the missionary. The scythe must be destroyed at once. What, they said, if it should fall into the hands of thieves; a whole field could be cut and carried away in a single night.” And so the scythe was banished, progress stopped, because nonusers could imagine a possible–but wholly improbable–way it could significantly harm their society.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Discrete Caution Is Not Always Prudent in Corrupt China

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) When economic reform and the seductive breeze of political liberalization come to China in the 1980s, the author’s cautious father tells his children that if they want to succeed they should be discreet. He urges his son, who is at Shanghai’s Fudan University, not to waste his time on useless foreign books. When the son first reads Shakespeare, he thinks that the expression “to be or not to be” is taken from Confucius. His father tells him that asking for too much freedom can land you in jail. “If you are not careful the government could crush you like a bug.” Not long after this warning, the student democracy movement was smashed apart at Tiananmen Square, though Mr. Huang’s father did not live to see it.

In the end, it is the father who suffers as his world collapses. Toward the end of his life he was told by the Party that he was to be rewarded for devising a money-saving program at his state factory with promotion and a better wage. Instead the promotion went to the girlfriend of the local Party secretary, and the firm’s bosses split his wage rise among themselves. Embittered and exhausted, he died of a heart attack in 1988, ahead of his mother.

For the full review, see:
MICHAEL FATHERS. “BOOKSHELF; Coming of Age In Mao’s China; Death cannot be controlled by the party, but disposing of a body can. So the author’s father built a coffin in secret at his mother’s request..” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., April 30, 2012): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 29, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Huang, Wenguang. The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012..

Chinese Couples Divorce to Avoid Government Regulations and Taxes

“A police officer attempted to stop residents from rushing into a real estate trading center in Shanghai after new restrictions were announced.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) SHANGHAI — When the Chinese government announced new curbs on property prices this month, homeowners bombarded social networking sites with complaints. They formed long lines at property bureaus to register to sell their homes before the restrictions went into effect.

And some couples went even further: they filed for divorce.
Divorce filings shot up here and in other big cities across China this past week after rumors spread that one way to avoid the new 20 percent tax on profits from housing sales was to separate from a spouse, at least on paper.
The surge in divorce filings is the latest indication of how volatile an issue real estate has become in China in the past decade and how resistant people are to additional taxes.
. . .
On Friday, at a marriage registration center in the Pudong district, a 33-year-old woman named Frances Tao arrived with her husband. She acknowledged that they were filing for divorce, not to avoid the 20 percent capital gains tax on second homes, but to get around another restriction, which requires home buyers to put down a much higher deposit on a second home than on a primary residence.
Ms. Tao said that by divorcing, one of them would be able to purchase a first home and put down less money and get a better interest rate.
“We don’t have other choices,” Ms. Tao said. “But the government and developers continue to make a lot of money.”

For the full story, see:
DAVID BARBOZA. “In China, Checklist for a Home Seller: First, Get a Divorce.” The New York Times (Sat., March 9, 2012): A4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 8, 2012.)

Chinese Communists Starved 45 Million in Mao’s Famine

Source of book image: http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/xun.jpg

(p. C5) It is difficult to look dispassionately at some 45 million dead. It was not war that produced this shocking number, nor natural disaster. It was a man. It was politics and one man’s vanity. The cause was famine and violence across rural China, a result of Mao Zedong’s unchecked drive to turn his country rapidly into a communist utopia and a leading industrial nation.
. . .
(p. C6) . . . important pieces of evidence are being covered up . . . : Some originals transcribed in Zhou Xun’s chastening documentary history, “The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962” ( . . . ) have since been reclassified by the Beijing authorities and vanished once more into closed files.
In 2010, Frank Dikötter produced “Mao’s Great Famine,” an authoritative account of the catastrophe, written with a bravura seldom seen in Western writing on modern China. Impassioned and outraged, Mr. Dikötter detailed the destruction, the suffering and the cruelty or hubris of China’s leaders. Sorting through forgotten and hidden documents with great intellectual honesty, Mr. Dikötter ended his journey pointing his finger directly at Mao, who notoriously said, as he called for higher grain deliveries from the countryside at the height of the famine: “It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
. . .
As a teenager in 1959, Mr. Yang watched his father die of starvation. Years later, while working in a senior editorial post at Xinhua, China’s state-controlled news agency, he began his own search for the truth behind the famine. The author spent 20 years tracking down survivors across China and using his authority as a respected Communist cadre to access provincial archives. It was, in part, expiation for his shame in not questioning his father’s death.
. . .
There is no memorial anywhere in China to the victims of the famine, no public monument, no remembrance day. Graves are not marked and mass burial grounds have disappeared into the landscape. The famine’s very existence has been denied. The Communist Party will only admit to “food shortages” and “some difficulties” during the Great Leap Forward. They claim that these setbacks were a result of natural disasters.
Mr. Yang set about writing his book as a tombstone for his father and for every victim who had died from starvation. He was also erecting a tombstone for the system that brought about the Great Famine. First published in Hong Kong in 2008, Mr. Yang’s work is banned in China. The reason is clear: The book challenges the very foundation of the Communist Party’s authority.

For the full review, see:
MICHAEL FATHERS. “BOOKSHELF; A Most Secret Tragedy; The Great Leap Forward aimed to make China an industrial giant–instead it killed 45 million.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., October 27, 2012): C5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 26, 2012.)

Books under review:
Yang, Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Zhou, Xun, ed. The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

The Dikötter book mentioned, is:
Dikötter, Frank. Mao’s Great Famine. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.

Entrepreneur Ping Fu Learned the Resilience of Bamboo

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) The history of American business is full of immigrant success stories–of men and women who flee poverty and oppression in their home countries, arrive on our shores with only pennies in their pockets, and go on to build companies that generate wealth, create jobs, and provide innovative products and services.

Count among them Ping Fu, the Chinese-born chief executive of the high-tech company Geomagic, which provides 3D-imaging for such modern-day miracles as customized prosthetic limbs. If your child wears orthodontic braces, chances are that they were designed for his teeth with the help of Geomagic technology. Ms. Fu founded the company in 1997, 13 years after arriving in San Francisco with $80 in her purse and three English phrases in her vocabulary: “hello,” “thank you” and “help.”
. . .
In the U.S., Ms. Fu worked as a maid, a waitress and a baby sitter while learning English and studying computer science. She eventually landed at Bell Labs in Illinois before striking out on her own. “I was a reluctant and unlikely entrepreneur,” she writes. In China, “I had been hardwired to think that money was evil, and traumatized as a child because of my family’s success.” Encouraged by her Shanghai Papa to follow in the family’s entrepreneurial tradition, she and her then-husband launched Geomagic. In her book, she traces the challenges she faced in building a company–obtaining funding, winning customers, managing a growing staff of professionals.
Ms. Fu’s life story raises a core question about the development of the human psyche: Why is it that, confronted with the kind of horrors that Ms. Fu experienced as a child, some survivors succeed in later life while others fail, overcome by the trials they endured?
Ms. Fu credits the tranquil, happy childhood she experienced for the first eight years of her life. She also points to the Taoist teachings of her Shanghai Papa, who taught her to admire the flexible nature of the bamboo trees that grew in the family garden. Bamboo, he told her, “suggests resilience, meaning that we have the ability to bounce back from even the most difficult times.”

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “BOOKSHELF; The Art Of Resilience; Ping Fu endured gang-rape and political prison in China before arriving on our shores and founding her own high-tech firm.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., January 9, 2013): D7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 8, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Fu, Ping. Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds. New York: Portfolio, 2012.

Yang Documents How Mao Starved the Proletariat

Source of book image: http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/9780374277932_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG

(p. C12) Yang Jisheng’s “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962” exemplifies E.H. Carr’s famous dictum: “Study the historian before you study the facts.” Mr. Yang is not the first historian to exhume the darkest crime of the political party that still rules China but the first Chinese journalist and longtime Party member to do so. He uses the Party’s own historical records and the perpetrators’ own words to craft his devastatingly detailed indictment.

For the full review essay, see:
Sylvia Nasar (author of passage quoted above, one of 50 contributors to whole article). “Twelve Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends to tell us what books they enjoyed in 2012–from Judd Apatow’s big plans to Bruce Wagner’s addictions. See pages C10 and C11 for the Journal’s own Top Ten lists.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 15, 2012): passim (Nasar’s contribution is on p. C12).
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date December 14, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Yang, Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Steve Jobs Advised Obama to Reduce Regulations of Business and Union Power in Education

(p. 544) The meeting . . . lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back. “You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.
Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis added.)